Yayoi Kusama: Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love, the Love in My Heart, 2023

Yayoi Kusama: Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love, the Love in My Heart, 2023. David Zwirner at Art Basel 2024 Unlimited. Basel (Switzerland), June 13, 2024.

Painted with Yayoi Kusama’s characteristic dots in vertical stripes, this monumental sculpture is part of a series of bronze pumpkin works first shown in the artist’s 2023 exhibition ‘I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers’ at David Zwirner, New York. While pumpkin shapes have appeared in Kusama’s work since her early art studies in Japan in the 1950s, this organic form became central to her oeuvre from the 1980s onward. Here, its normally spherical shape is transfigured into an undulating surface, as if topologically morphed or stretched. The work’s installation prompts viewers to explore the work from various perspectives, each shift in viewpoint unveiling a dynamic interplay of space and form.

Yayoi Kusama (born 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan) makes paintings, sculptures, and installations that allude to microscopic and macroscopic universes, and have transcended two of the most important art movements of the second half of the 20th century: Pop art and Minimalism. Kusama lives and works in Tokyo.

— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.

Posted in: art, Art Basel, Basel, no comment, snapshot