Pumpkin (RY) (Kusama 233) (1996) by Yayoi Kusama places the pumpkin in red against black — the most high-contrast pairing in the series, the form burning out of the dark ground with an intensity that the yellow variants approach but never quite match. The black dots scale from small along the outer ribs to large circles across the widest areas, tracing the volume of the pumpkin in the same systematic way as the other works in the series but here in reverse — dark marks on a warm ground rather than warm marks on dark. The effect is different.

The red absorbs the dots rather than contrasting with them, the pattern and the form merging into a single mass of colour that reads from a distance as almost solid before resolving, on closer inspection, into its constituent marks. The angular field in the black ground is rendered in red, the same tone as the pumpkin — so where other works in the series keep the background and the form in clearly distinct colours, here they share a single hue across two different systems. The pumpkin is dots and curves; the ground is lines and angles.

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