Pumpkin (M), 2016, is an iconic bronze pumpkin sculpture impressed with a pattern of black circles within its mirror-polished surface, which catches and reflects ambient light. It is among the first mirror polished bronze pumpkin sculptures created by Yayoi Kusama and integrates many key aspects of the artist’s practice: the reflectivity of the mirror, the repeating pattern of dots, a juxtaposition of light and dark, connotations of growth and fertility and the almost-mythical status of the pumpkin in her art.

The pumpkin, or kabocha, with its dotted skin has, in various forms, been a recurring motif in Kusama’s art since the late 1940s. The artist’s family cultivated plant seeds in Matsumoto, and she was familiar with the kabocha squash in the fields that surrounded her childhood home. At around the same time, the artist first experienced hallucinations in which her surroundings were overtaken by a proliferating pattern that engulfed her field of vision.

It was after Kusama’s return to Japan from New York in the 1970s that she began to revisit the pumpkin form. Explored across scales, colours and media, it has come to represent for Kusama a kind of alter-ego or self-portrait – part organic, part conceptual – and occupies a special place in her iconography. Each pumpkin has a distinct character, as if caught in a particular stage of growth. Arrangements of dots on their plump bodies and curving stems, meanwhile, seem as unique as fingerprints. Enchanted by their ‘charming and winsome’ forms, the artist has said it is the pumpkin’s ‘general unpretentiousness’ which appeals to her.

Born in Matsumoto City, Japan, in 1929, Yayoi Kusama lives and works in Tokyo. Over the past decade there have been museum exhibitions of Kusama’s work touring the world in North America, Japan, Korea, Singapore, China, Australia, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Spain, England, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. In 2016, Kusama received the Order of Culture, one of the highest honours bestowed by the Imperial Family. Kusama is the first woman to be honoured with the prestigious medal for drawings and sculptures. In 2021, the New York Botanical Garden will host an exhibition inspired by Kusama’s lifelong engagement with nature and fascination with the natural world. Among additional major exhibitions in 2021 is Kusama’s first large-scale retrospective in Germany, which takes place at the Gropius Bau in Berlin.