Throughout her career spanning over 60 years, Yayoi Kusama is one of the internationally renowned modern artists from Japan. In 1993, Kusama represented Japan at the Venice Biennale, where her mirrors and pumpkins installation were highly acclaimed and a critical success. In 2006 she became the first Japanese female artist to receive the “Praemium Imperiale”, Japan’s most prestigious prize for internationally recognized artists. Her works are included in the collections of leading museums throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Modern in London, Centre Pompidou, Paris and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. In 2008, her “Infinity Nets” No. 2 set the highest price paid at auction for a living female artist, selling for more than five million dollars in New York. In 2012, she has been honored with a major retrospective of her life’s works at the Tate Modern Gallery in London.

Kusama’s art is deeply rooted in her psychology, her iconography and images are invariably linked to her early life. Suffering a traumatic childhood at the hands of her mother, at the age of ten she began to have hallucinations. She has recounted that one day as she was sitting at the kitchen table, she was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth. When she looked up, she saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows, the walls, her own body and ultimately the universe. These hallucinations were to persist with her for the rest of her life, and everything in her art from her paintings to her sculptures to her installations even with naked bodies was to become covered in dots, nets or flowers. She has said that the only way she could cope with the obsessional images of her constant hallucinations was to translate them into the outside world in all of her works. Her artworks candidly depict her own history and inescapable nightmares in details. In the forms of paintings, sculptures and performance art, Kusama peers into surreal psychology and expresses the universe of her mind. Her highly contrastive color schemes returns traces of visual art, music and fashion during the psychedelic period. Her significance is perhaps attributable to her icon status, and her explicit yet soulful manifestation.

Leaving the canvas and taking three-dimensional form, Pumpkin brings Yayoi Kusama’s visually stimulating compositions to tangible reality. Carefully sculpted in the asymmetrical imperfection of true life, Pumpkin commands attention and consideration despite its static and deceptively simple nature.“Pumpkin” is different from the pottery clay and FRP of the past. Using a multimedia format to converse with one’s own thoughts, it draws you in by creating the illusion of you talking to pumpkins at a farm as a child. The influence left by the round shape of the pumpkin is then transferred over to her later artistic vocabulary; Kusama Yayoi used the unique qualities of her subject to express her own inner turmoil, using detailed brush strokes to neatly arrange black dots onto the surface of the pumpkin. The fine stripes created through their different sizes give the sculptures a strong sense of appeal.“A polka dot has the form of the sun,” states Kusama, “which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm.” In Pumpkin, Kusama has captured this sensational essence of the polka dot, reflected in the structure, composition, and pattern of the simple pumpkin, creating a vibrant, living form which exceeds the boundaries of its stationary nature.