Pumpkin

Yayoi Kusama was born into a wealthy family that had been in the agricultural and plant nursery business for over a century. The artist said her favourite thing to do in her childhood was to play in the seed farm. Surrounded by different species of plants within, she particularly found the pumpkin uniquely fascinating - it became a universally loved subject matter that appeared in many of her works. The format of the Pumpkin (Lot 242) triptych is very similar to the treatment used in commercial advertising. By using a motif repeatedly, a personalised symbol is established. Although the three pumpkins are different in the colour - red, yellow, and green, and slightly different in shape, Kusama unified these two subjects by complementing them with an rderly array of black dots. The contrast between the vivid hues and black is an exercise that stimulates the viewers' optic nerves. When the viewers attempt to move their gazes by following the sequence of big-to-small dots in order to sense the three dimensionality of the piece, they fall into hallucinatory trap set by Kusama. Every lack dot is supposed to be its own individual entity. They are not meant to express naturalistic perspective or light-and-shadow treatment. The black dots and the tricolour nets combined to form Kusama's infinity world - the imageries of the pumpkins have actually been obliterated within the void.