Serpentine and The Royal Parks have announced the unveiling of a new large-scale sculpture by Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929, Matsumoto, Japan; lives and works in Tokyo, Japan). Located by the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, Pumpkin (2024) will be staged from 9th July to 3rd November 2024.
I am sending to London with love my giant pumpkin. Since my childhood pumpkins have been a great comfort to me, they are such tender things to touch, so appealing in colour and form. They are humble and amusing at the same time and speak to me of the joy of living.
Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkin (2024) marks a return to Serpentine for Kusama which was the location of her first retrospective exhibition in Britain in 2000. This major survey included paintings, collages, watercolours, sculptures, documentation of performances and films, all of which explored Kusama’s obsessions with dots, nets, food and sex.
The work on view in Kensington Gardens is Kusama’s tallest bronze pumpkin sculpture to date, standing at 6 metres tall and 5.5 metres in diameter. Installed prominently by the Round Pond, Pumpkin (2024) can be seen from a wide variety of viewpoints and perspectives creating an intriguing dialogue with the surrounding environment of the Park.
Known for her immersive installations, large-scale sculptures and intricate paintings, Yayoi Kusama often features kabocha, or pumpkin, in her work. Since 1946 Kusama’s pumpkins have taken many forms, colours and shapes, but their surfaces are consistently covered in the artist’s signature repeating polka dot pattern.
Kusama’s relationship to the kabocha is rooted in her childhood: the artist’s family cultivated the plant’s seeds, and their home was surrounded by fields of this squash. Pumpkins frequently appear as stand-ins for self-portraits. Kusama admires them for their everyday quality, hardiness, and unique, frequently humorous forms.
It is an honour to present this work by Yayoi Kusama in Kensington Gardens. Her signature pumpkins have become a landmark motif for the artist, and this project is a reunion for Kusama and Serpentine: her first major survey exhibition in Britain was staged in our galleries in 2000. As always, we are deeply grateful to The Royal Parks for their collaboration, and to all our supporters whose generosity enables Serpentine’s public art programme to connect artists and audiences beyond gallery walls.
Bettina Korek, CEO, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine,
The artist’s sculptures have been installed in museums and galleries around the world, and various outdoor spaces, including parks, gardens and at the seaside. Since 1994, a yellow and black pumpkin is permanently on display at the Benesse Art Site Naoshima – an island in Japan’s inland sea dedicated to displaying art within nature.
Yayoi Kusama, Pumpkin (2024), The Round Pond, Kensington Gardens, 9th July – 3rd November 2024
About the artist
Yayoi Kusama is one of the most celebrated artists of our time. Over the course of her eight-decade career, she has developed a unique and diverse body of work that, highly personal in nature, connects profoundly with global audiences. Known for her signature motifs including the polka-dot and pumpkin, Kusama’s extraordinary artistic endeavours have spanned painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, performance, film, printmaking, installation and environmental art as well as literature, fashion (most notably in her 2012 and 2023 collaboration with Louis Vuitton) and product design.
