Pumpkin (RSQ)

Medium: Screen-print in colors on Verin d’Arches paper
[3 screens, 2 colors, 3 runs]
Year: 1998
Image: 30×30 cm (11.8 x 11.8 inches)
Sheet: 39.5 x 38 cm (15.6 x 15 inches)
Edition: 120
Artist’s Proofs: 12 AP
Printer’s Proofs: 5 PP
Printer: Okabe Tokuzo, Tokyo
Literature: ABE 242
Yayoi Kusama Prints 1979-2017, ABE Publishing Ltd., Number 242, Illustrated page 144

Signed, dated, and numbered in pencil on lower edge

Pumpkin (RSQ) dated 1998 belongs to a later, more theatrical phase in Yayoi Kusama’s pumpkin imagery, where the motif has fully absorbed the lessons of the previous decades and re-emerges with heightened intensity and polish. The work is less about balance than about controlled excess. Its form is immediately familiar, ribbed, voluminous, and constructed through meticulously scaled polka dots. But here the dots are pushed toward maximal contrast. Large, emphatic black circles dominate the central ribs, while smaller dots cluster toward the edges, creating a dramatic chiaroscuro effect without any modulation of light. The pumpkin feels swollen, almost pressurized, as if charged from within.

The red-on-black palette is unapologetically forceful. By the late 1990s, Kusama no longer uses red sparingly or symbolically; she unleashes it. Red saturates the pumpkin’s surface with urgency and psychological heat, while black absorbs and intensifies it. This is not red as accent, but red as condition. The pumpkin does not glow: it burns. The background reinforces this intensity. The black field is overlaid with sharp, angular red net lines that read as more rigid and assertive than earlier infinity nets. These lines feel less organic, more diagrammatic, creating a sense of containment that verges on enclosure. Unlike earlier works where the pumpkin resists its surroundings, here it seems locked in a charged equilibrium with them, neither dissolving nor escaping.

Technically, the print reflects Kusama’s late-1990s precision. The surface is clean, the registration exact, and the repetition uncompromising. There is no softness left in the system. Repetition has become doctrine: absolute, unwavering, and fully internalized. Conceptually, Pumpkin (RSQ) reads as a culmination rather than a transition. The pumpkin is no longer autobiographical, stabilizing, or mythic, it is iconic in the strictest sense. It functions as a self-contained symbol, instantly legible and unapologetically assertive. Where earlier pumpkins negotiated space, this one occupies it.

Auction Results

iART Tokyo: 27 April 2025
Estimated: JPY 3,000,000 – 5,000,000
JPY 4,830,000 / USD 33,640

YAYOI KUSAMA
PUMPKIN (RSQ), 1998
Print (screenprint)
Signed
Printer’s Proof
Aside from edition of 120

Mainichi Auction: 14 March 2024
Estimated: JPY 3,000,000 – 5,000,000
JPY 6,210,000 / USD 41,905