After her successful international collaboration with fashion house Louis Vuitton, the Japanese empress of polka dots returns to London with some new gourd themed bronze sculptures and paintings. Her obsession might be dotty, but Kusama’s been fascinated by pumpkins for the majority of her career, returning to depicting them in a number of her works, whether in prints, installations or monumental sculptures. She employs the vegetable’s allegorical connotations as well as using it as a form of self-portraiture, “It seems that pumpkins do not inspire much respect. But I was enchanted by their charming and winsome form. What appealed to me most was the pumpkin’s generous unpretentiousness. That and its solid spiritual base.”
The show finishes on Oct 4, but the bronze sculptures will remain in the water garden until Dec 19.
Watch Yayoi Kusama read her poem 'On Pumpkins'
Yayoi Kusama reading her poem 'On Pumpkins' from Victoria Miro on Vimeo.