KUSAMA YAYOI Pumpkin

• LOT

  1815

• Artist

  KUSAMA YAYOI ( 1929 - 2026 )

• Estimate

  2,800,000 - 3,800,000 121,739 - 165,217 140,000 - 190,000 560,000 - 760,000 17,500 - 23,750

  JPY RMB HKD TWD USD

• Result

  Members only

• Details

  bronze　　1993
  numbered, dated and signed
  ED.30
  accompanied by a certificate with the artist's signature issued by gallery KURA
  original mould executed in 1988, this artwork executed in 1993
  Provenance: Mizutani Art, Tokyo
  
  KUSAMA YAYOI was one of the most prominent avant-garde artists of postwar Japan, known for her diverse body of work spanning painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and literature. In 1957, she moved alone to the United States and began working in New York. During the 1960s, she gained attention for her use of polka dots and repetitive motifs, while engaging with artistic and social currents such as minimalism, pop art, feminism, and anti-war activism, and gradually earned international acclaim.
  Kusama's works frequently feature repeated motifs such as polka dots, net patterns, and pumpkins. These visual elements are closely connected to the hallucinations, obsessive imagery, and repetitive visions she experienced from childhood. They blur the boundaries between self and universe, reality and fantasy, creating immersive experiences. Kusama repeatedly spoke of the vital role that art played in her life and creative practice.
  Her works are housed in major institutions around the world, including the Dallas Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, and the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka. Kusama is regarded as one of the most renowned and influential artists of the contemporary era.
  
  This work was cast in bronze in 1993 from an original mould for a "Pumpkin" created by Kusama Yayoi in 1974. From the 1970s onward, Kusama expanded her practice beyond painting and prints to include three-dimensional works in bronze, ceramic, and other media, exploring a materiality and sense of volume distinct from those of her two-dimensional works. In bronze, forms from her practice were transformed into independent sculptures with a tangible physical presence, further emphasizing the presence of the forms themselves. In the present work, the rounded body and deeply incised grooves create pronounced undulations, accentuated by the solidity and weight of bronze, while the shadows produced by light further emphasize its three-dimensionality. By recasting the form conceived in 1974 in bronze in 1993, the work presents the original form anew as a sculpture at a different point in time. It also offers insight into the development of Kusama's small-scale sculptural practice of the 1970s and its subsequent expansion into a more diverse sculptural practice from the 1990s onward.
  
  H:13.0cm D:15.5cm
  (H:5 ⅛ in. D:6 ⅛ in.)　

• Organizer

  Jo's Auction

• Auction

  Jo’s Auction Autumn Auction of Art Works 2026

• Catalog

  Contemporary Art/Modern&Post-War Art

• Date

  2026/10/21