Pumpkin (Kusama 142) (1990) by Yayoi Kusama is one of the most chromatically unusual works in the Pumpkins series — the form rendered in a palette of orange, yellow, pink, red and pale turquoise that gives it an almost tropical intensity, the dots tracing the ribs in shifting colour bands rather than the single-colour systems of the later works. The pumpkin here is elongated and narrow, the rounded sections hanging downward in loose organic curves rather than sitting upright. Each contour carries its own colour sequence — orange at the centre giving way to pink and red at the edges, the pale turquoise dots running along the inner ridges creating a cool counterpoint to the warmth of the surrounding tones.

The dark stem at the top, rendered in deep green-black, anchors the image and provides the one point of stillness in an otherwise highly active image. The background is equally dense — a dark field broken into an irregular angular field, the same interlocking network that appears across her work from this period but here pressing in against a form that is itself far more complex in colour than the yellow-on-black works that define the series in the public imagination. The contrast between the richly coloured pumpkin and the dark fractured ground gives the image a jewel-like quality that sets it apart from the later editions. Produced in 1990 in an edition of 100, Pumpkin (Kusama 142) predates the bigger Pumpkins works and represents an earlier, more exploratory moment in Kusama's engagement with this motif — before the colour combinations were codified into the YB, RY and ST designations of the later series.

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