Atypical repetitions: Yayoi Kusama’s ‘Pumpkin’

In this video, Washington DC Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden director, Melissa Chiu, explores what makes Yayoi Kusama’s 2016 sculpture and installation ‘Pumpkin’ a masterpiece.

Covered in the contemporary Japanese artist’s signature polka-dot effect, the eight-foot-tall work embodies Kusama’s lifelong fascination with pumpkins, and investigation into themes of nature, fantasy, life and death.

“With just one polka dot, nothing can be achieved. In the universe, there is the sun, the moon, the earth and hundreds of millions of stars,” the artist has mused. “Pursuing the philosophy of the universe through art, under such circumstances, has led me to what I call stereotypical repetition.”

Today, Kusama’s works can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, among others.

View the original video here.

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