Lemon Squash (2) (1999) by Yayoi Kusama takes a single everyday object — a tall glass with a straw and a slice of lemon on the rim — and rebuilds it entirely from the inside out through pattern, dot, and line. The glass is rendered in yellow against a green ground, the two colours belonging to the same warm spectrum but distinct enough to hold the form clearly against the background. Every element of the image is covered in a different system of marks: the lemon slice mapped in a fine web of interlocking lines, the glass itself organised in zones of dots that graduate from small at the top to large circles at the base, the straw rendered in a tight diagonal grid, the foreground in a brick-like rectangular pattern, the background in the angular interlocking mesh that runs through many of Kusama's works from this period.

Each zone has its own logic, yet the whole reads as a single unified field. The choice of subject connects to a strand of Kusama's work that runs alongside the Pumpkins and Infinity Nets — everyday objects from domestic and commercial life, the kind of things that appear in Pop Art but handled here with none of Pop's irony. Where Warhol flattened consumer imagery to comment on its emptiness, Kusama covers it in pattern until the object becomes something else entirely — not a comment on consumerism but an investigation into how mark structure can inhabit any form it encounters. Produced in an edition of sixty, Lemon Squash (2) is among the more intimate works in Kusama's printed output from the late 1990s, the small edition and the specificity of the subject giving it a different quality from the larger Pumpkins portfolios of the same period.

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