
Fauna
2 works

Pumpkin (YY), 1996
Screenprint
9 1/10 × 11 4/5 in | 23 × 30 cm
Edition of 120
Yayoi Kusama stands as one of the most influential living artists of our time, her work commanding significant attention across both institutional and commercial spheres. With a career spanning over seven decades, Kusama has built an unmistakable visual vocabulary rooted in obsessive repetition, infinity, and the dissolution of self—themes that have secured her place in major permanent collections worldwide, from the Museum of Modern Art to the Tate Modern. Pumpkin (YY) from 1996 represents a refined example of Kusama's enduring engagement with the pumpkin motif, a subject she has described as both humble and amusing, embodying a spiritual and physical resonance she finds deeply personal. The gourd's organic, bulbous form serves as an ideal canvas for her signature polka-dot patterning, transforming the quotidian vegetable into an object of meditative intensity. This screenprint captures the tension between flatness and volume, the dots both decorating the surface and suggesting infinite spatial depth—a hallmark of Kusama's broader conceptual concerns. Executed during a particularly prolific period in the mid-1990s, this work predates the global institutional surge of interest in Kusama's practice that would follow in subsequent decades. The edition of 120 reflects the accessibility Kusama has historically extended through her print work, allowing collectors entry into her universe without diminishing the integrity of her vision. Prints from this era have demonstrated consistent demand on the secondary market, affirming sustained collector confidence. Guy Hepner invites inquiries regarding the acquisition of this work.
Price on Application

Pumpkin MT · Yayoi Kusama · Christie's · 2021-10 · $168,750

Shanghai Pumpkin · Yayoi Kusama · Mallet · 2025-12 · $145,280

Pumpkin · Yayoi Kusama · K Auction · 2022-02 · $109,220

Pumpkin (Yellow T) · Yayoi Kusama · K Auction · 2025-06 · $108,011

Shanghai Pumpkin · Yayoi Kusama · Mallet · 2026-07 · $103,838


Yayoi Kusama
A Pumpkin YB-D
2004

Yayoi Kusama
Dancing Pumpkin
2004

Yayoi Kusama
Napping Pumpkin
1993

Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkin
1992

Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkin (2)
1990

Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkin (ABC)
1996

Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkin (G)
1992

Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkin (GT)
1996

Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkin (Kusama 142)
1990

Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkin (OG)
1992

Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkin (Red)
1994

Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkin (RY) (Kusama 233)
1996

Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkin (White T)
1992

Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkin (White Y)
1992

Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkin (White)
1992

Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkin (YT)
1996

Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkin 2000 (Green)
2000

Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkin 2000 (Red)
2000

Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkin 2000 (yellow)
2000

Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkin BY
2004

Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkin RT
2004

Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkin RY
2004

Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkin S
1992

Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkin YB-A
2004

Yayoi Kusama
Pumpkins and Fruits
1993

Yayoi Kusama
Three Pumpkins
1993
Yayoi Kusama's Pumpkins series represents one of the most recognizable and consistently performing bodies of work in contemporary art.
The Pumpkins series has demonstrated remarkable auction resilience across market cycles. Dancing Pumpkin (2004) achieved HKD 39,783 at auction in December 2025, while the earlier Napping Pumpkin (1993) realized HKD 27,187 at Sotheby's in October 2017.
Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, Yayoi Kusama developed her obsession with pumpkins during the 1940s, finding in their irregular forms a source of both comfort and creative inspiration. The motif emerged prominently in her practice during the late 1980s and has since become synonymous with her artistic identity, appearing across paintings, sculptures, prints, and immersive installations.
The pumpkin holds profound autobiographical significance for Kusama. She has described these forms as possessing an "amusing and warm-hearted" quality, their bulbous shapes and textured surfaces offering infinite possibilities for her signature polka-dot patterning. This deeply personal connection distinguishes the Pumpkins series from her other recurring motifs, investing each work with emotional authenticity that resonates across cultural boundaries.
Kusama's institutional presence has cemented the pumpkin as a defining symbol of contemporary art. Major retrospectives at Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art have prominently featured pumpkin works, while her Infinity Mirror Rooms—installed worldwide—frequently incorporate the motif. This museum validation, combined with Kusama's status as the world's best-selling living female artist, positions the Pumpkins series at the intersection of critical recognition and market achievement.
The series spans multiple decades and mediums, with Guy Hepner's New York inventory encompassing works from 1982 through the early 2000s. This chronological range allows collectors to trace the evolution of Kusama's approach to the pumpkin form, from early lithographic experiments to the vibrant screenprints that define her contemporary production.
Kusama's Pumpkins series demonstrates exceptional technical diversity, with each medium offering distinct characteristics for collectors and institutions.
Screenprint Works: The majority of Pumpkins editions utilize screenprinting techniques, allowing Kusama to achieve the saturated, flat color fields essential to her aesthetic vision. Pumpkin 2000 (yellow), executed as a screen print in colors on Colorplan paper, exemplifies her mastery of this medium. The Colorplan substrate provides archival stability while accepting Kusama's intense pigments with remarkable fidelity. Pumpkin RY (2004), Pumpkin YB-A (2004), and Dancing Pumpkin (2004) represent the mature phase of her screenprint production, characterized by precise registration and chromatic intensity.
Lithograph and Collage: The 1982 Pumpkin combines lithographic printing with collage elements, representing an earlier experimental approach within the series. This hybrid technique predates Kusama's systematic screenprint production and offers collectors access to her transitional methodology.
Unique Works: Pumpkin (ABC) from 1996, executed in acrylic on canvas, represents the pinnacle of the series' hierarchy. Original paintings command significantly higher values than editioned works, though their rarity limits market availability.
Documentation Standards: Works such as Pumpkin (Kusama 142) from 1990 feature comprehensive front-of-work documentation, signed, numbered, dated, and titled by the artist. This level of provenance documentation aligns with international museum acquisition standards and auction house authentication requirements.
Pumpkin 2000 (yellow) captures the artist's millennial production, distinguished by optimistic coloration and refined technique. The yellow palette connects directly to Kusama's monumental outdoor pumpkin sculptures, including the iconic Naoshima installation.
Dancing Pumpkin (2004) achieved the highest recent auction result within this group, confirming sustained collector interest in mid-2000s editions.
Yayoi Kusama has built one of the most instantly recognisable bodies of work in contemporary art through her sustained investigation of pattern, repetition, and self-obliteration, developed across painting, sculpture, installation, and print media over more than seven decades. Her recurring motifs — polka dots, net patterns, and later the pumpkin — function as a personal visual vocabulary rooted in hallucinatory visual experiences she has described since childhood, transformed through disciplined repetition into a body of work of extraordinary scale and consistency.
Kusama's work is held in the permanent collections of major museums worldwide, and her Infinity Mirror Room installations have drawn record attendance at institutions internationally, establishing her as one of the most widely recognised and best-selling living artists.

Yayoi Kusama prints for sale at Guy Hepner Gallery in New York include Infinity Net editions, pumpkin screenprints, dot works, Flower Ball multiples, and the full range of her extraordinary print output — representing one of the most consistently in-demand bodies of work in the contemporary edition market. For collectors seeking Yayoi Kusama art for sale, Guy Hepner at 177 Tenth Avenue, New York offers expert guidance, authenticated works across all her major print series, and access to a market that has demonstrated exceptional sustained strength.
Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929, Matsumoto, Japan) is the highest-selling living female artist in the world and one of the most instantly recognisable visual presences in contemporary art — an artist whose dots, nets, pumpkins, and Infinity Mirror Rooms have achieved a cultural ubiquity that coexists, without diminishing, with the genuine psychological intensity from which her work emerged. Kusama began making art as a child as a means of processing the hallucinations she experienced — flowers speaking to her, the self dissolving into fields of pattern and repetition — and the therapeutic impetus has never separated itself from the formal achievement. The work is not illustration of pathology but its transformation into aesthetic proposition.
Kusama received traditional Japanese painting training before moving to New York in 1958, where she became a conspicuous and somewhat isolated figure in an avant-garde largely indifferent to her practice. Her Infinity Net paintings — monumental canvases covered in an unbroken weave of looping marks applied with obsessive labour — anticipated the Minimalist investigation of serial mark-making while remaining intensely personal, each loop a unit in an accumulation too vast to resolve into pattern.
The visual world Kusama has created across her long career rests on a small number of obsessively repeated motifs:
Kusama's auction record stands at $7,109,000 for Infinity Nets (TW) at Christie's, with multiple major Net canvases from the late 1950s and 1960s achieving $5,000,000+ at Sotheby's and Christie's. An Infinity Nets canvas from 1959 achieved $5,098,000 at Christie's in November 2021. She has held the record for the highest auction result achieved by a living female artist for many years. Her major paintings — particularly early Net works and large-scale Infinity environments — are held primarily in institutional collections or by committed long-term private collectors and rarely come to market.
Her print editions — featuring signature dot and pumpkin imagery — are among the most actively traded in the contemporary edition market, with strong global demand across price points. Kusama has worked with publishers in Japan and internationally to produce editions across all major print media: screenprints, lithographs, woodcuts, and etchings.
Print prices range from $8,000–$15,000 for smaller open-style editions through $50,000–$200,000+ for rare signed limited editions featuring pumpkins, infinity net patterns, or dot works in high demand colourways. Works produced in collaboration with Ota Fine Arts and other authorised publishers carry the strongest provenance.
Motif: Pumpkin works and infinity net prints consistently outperform generic dot compositions. Flower Ball works carry strong demand. Early net works on paper, if available, are among the rarest and most historically significant objects in her output.
Edition size and signature: Small-edition signed prints carry significant premium over open editions. Certificates of authenticity from Ota Fine Arts or the artist's studio are essential for any significant acquisition.
Colourway: Yellow and black pumpkin works (echoing her iconic Naoshima installation) carry premium. Red and white, gold, and silver colourways in dot and net works also command strong demand.
Condition: Kusama's prints are typically produced on quality substrates, but UV protection and stable storage are critical to long-term value preservation.
Provenance: Works with direct gallery provenance from Ota Fine Arts, Victoria Miro, or Zwirner hold value most reliably.
Kusama's work is held in permanent collections at MoMA, the Whitney Museum, Tate, the Centre Pompidou, the Guggenheim, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Hirshhorn Museum, and The Broad in Los Angeles. A landmark joint retrospective toured Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, the Whitney, and MoMA in 2012. She continues to produce work daily from her studio in Tokyo.
Guy Hepner offers authenticated Yayoi Kusama art for sale with full provenance documentation from our gallery at 177 Tenth Avenue, New York. We provide expert guidance on acquisition, free and confidential valuations for those wishing to sell, and access to a global network of collectors actively seeking her work across all media and price points. Whether you are seeking Yayoi Kusama prints for sale in a specific motif or colourway, or exploring her broader edition output, Guy Hepner is the right starting point.