Pumpkin Army

An etching, in contrast to her predominantly screenprinted output of the 1990s, Pumpkin Army shows a massed grouping of pumpkins — likely a regular grid or dense cluster filling the sheet — rendered with the fine, hatched line that the etched plate permits. Where screenprint reduces the pumpkin to flat colour and pattern, etching allows Kusama to build the form through accumulated linear marks, with cross-hatching standing in for the dotted surfaces familiar from her prints in other media. The 'Army' of the title invokes the multiplication and serialisation that has organised her practice from the early Infinity Net paintings onward, and which is given environmental form in her mirrored pumpkin installations. By 1994 Kusama was producing intaglio editions alongside her screenprint output, a shift connected to the technical resources of the Tokyo print workshops she worked with during this period. The work belongs to the proliferation of pumpkin imagery that followed her 1993 Venice presentation and that has continued to define her popular visual identity.