Women Artists

Pumpkin Spiced Yayoi Kusama

Magda Michalska 4 January 2023 min Read

Yayoi Kusama, the legendary Japanese artist born in 1929, began her career 69 years ago. Nevertheless, the world discovered her just a couple of years back. Now it’s trying to make up for a lost time through numerous exhibitions that are being organized around the world. In 2017, Kusama even opened an entire museum in Tokyo dedicated to her polka-dotted oeuvre. But what do pumpkins have to do with all this?

Pumpkins accompanied Yayoi Kusama from her early childhood. She grew up surrounded by a seed nursery owned by her family. With their whimsical shape and color, they represented a source of radiant energy and have been a lifelong inspiration and a beloved motif in her works. We may dare say that Kusama found a reflection of herself in their grotesque boldness, and simultaneous humility and simplicity. Therefore her pumpkins can serve as a sort of self-portrait.

Kusama launched her first Infinity Mirror Room in 1965 and has now created more than 20 such mirrored spaces, which are designed to fully immerse the spectator. The rooms are small and entirely covered in mirrors (on the walls, ceiling, and floor), which enhances the feeling of infinity. In the case of her rooms filled with pumpkins, it is a pumpkin infinity, as the artist fits 62 acrylic yellow pumpkins covered in black polka dots in the room.

She first began covering surfaces with painted polka dots when she was 10. As she later explained, she had been prompted by a series of vivid hallucinations that transformed the world around her into “dense fields of dots.” In the late 1940s, she spent two years in Kyoto, painting pumpkins because, as she has written, “pumpkins bring about poetic peace in my mind. Pumpkins talk to me.”

Yayoi Kusama, Pumpkin, 2016, Victoria Miro Gallery, London, pumpkin kusama

She has worked in various media, drawing from styles ranging from Surrealism to Pop Art. Her psychedelic art is difficult to categorize, which wins her unlimited freedom and many collaborations outside of fine arts, like the one with the high fashion brand Louis Vuitton.

Recommended

Lubaina Himid, The Operating Table, 2019. Women Artists

Stories of Black Britishness by Lubaina Himid

Winner of prestigious awards, including the Turner Prize, Lubaina Himid has a long and prolific career as an artist, curator, and teacher. Her art...

Natalia Tiberio 24 April 2023

Suzanne de Court. Suzanne de Court, Oval Plaque with the Annunciation, c. 1600, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD, USA. Women Artists

Suzanne de Court’s Enamel Masterpieces

Suzanne de Court was a French artist who was active at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. She focused on the production of enamel pieces with...

Jimena Escoto 24 April 2023

Anna Boberg Women Artists

Anna Boberg – Self-taught Painter of Lofoten Landscapes

Anna Boberg was a multidisciplinary self-taught artist active in Stockholm and Paris. She is best known for her arctic landscapes from Lofoten in...

Europeana 20 March 2023

Conservators restoring Plautilla Nelli’s Last Supper, found by Jane Fortune and her association. Women Artists

Art Detective Jane Fortune: Rediscovering Forgotten Female Artists

When Jane Fortune arrived in Florence in the 1960s to study art she was left with one burning question: where are the women artists? As she often...

Natalia Iacobelli 20 March 2023