Giant pumpkin is set to land in Hyde Park if Serpentine Gallery win permission for weird sculpture by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama

A giant weird pumpkin sculpture could soon grace Hyde Park just yards from Kensington Palace, MailOnline can reveal.

Plans have been submitted for a large polka-dotted artwork called the ‘Pumpkin’ by the Japanese contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama.

The 94-year-old is well known for her art featuring her trademark polka dots, as well as her dark, glittering light infinity rooms that pop up in major cities and subsequently flood Instagram feeds.

Celebrities have flocked to her exhibitions in London, Los Angeles and New York.

The maroon creation with black polka dots, based on a Kabocha or Japanese pumpkin, will measure six feet tall and 5.5 metres in diameter. It will be place from June to November this year if planning permission is granted. 

The artist has partnered with The Serpentine Gallery and The Royal Parks to bring the creation to London. Kusama’s will be the latest presentation in a long-standing series of public presentations in Hyde Park. 

The artist has frequently used the form of a pumpkin in her work. She first depicted them in 1946 and it has since been translated into many mediums. 

Over the years, Kusama’s pumpkins have taken many forms, colours and shapes, while always being covered in her famous pattern of polka dots in various sizes. 

The artists relationship to the kabocha stems from her childhood as her family home was surrounded by fields of the squash.

Planning agents for the Serpentine Gallery also explained the artist admires them for ‘their everyday quality, hardiness and their unique, frequently humorous forms.’ 

She once said: ‘Pumpkins have been a great comfort to me since my childhood. They speak to me of the joy of living. 

‘They are humble and amusing at the same time, and I have and always will celebrate them in my art.’ 

In planning documents submitted to Westminster City Council, planning agents DP9 Ltd, added: ‘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.

‘The sculpture is to be located on flat grassland between the Serpentine gallery and Kensington Palace, and will be positioned in an area towards the south east side of the sculptured Round Pond.’

Born in 1929 in central Japan’s Nagano prefecture, Kusama suffered from psychological trauma due to feuding between her parents, and was already drawing dots and nets as a child based on her hallucinatory experiences.

After moving to the United States in 1957 at age 28, Kusama became a fixture in the Pop and Minimalism art movements of the 1960s.

During a 16-year stint in New York, she staged ‘happenings’ at the height of the sexual liberation movement where people stripped naked and had their bodies painted with polka dots on Wall Street or Central Park. 

By the time Kusama returned to Japan in 1973, she was burned out and voluntarily checked into a psychiatric ward where she has lived ever since.

It was not until the 1990s that Kusama was ‘rediscovered’.

Her commercial success was highlighted when she collaborated with Louis Vuitton in 2012 and she was named the world’s most popular artist in 2014 by the Art Newspaper.

She often appears in a wheelchair and sporting her trademark red wig. 

Kusama was also named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people and is nicknamed ‘the queen of polka dots’,

One of her most famous installations is the yellow pumpkin in Naoshima, Japan. It became something of a tourist trademark when it was installed on one of the island’s piers in 1994.

The artwork was badly damaged after being swept up in a heavy typhoon in August 2021 but was later restored. 

German socialite Angela Gulbenkian was jailed in 2021 for fraud involving a Kusama artwork.

She pocketed a £982,000 payment for a large polka-dotted artwork called the ‘Kusama pumpkin’ but never handed over the item.

Gulbenkian, a member of one of Europe’s wealthiest art collecting families, then blew the funds in just eight months maintaining a ‘lavish’ lifestyle – including a £288,000 shopping spree, a £25,000 Rolex watch, and hiring a private jet.

Gulbenkian is said to have been introduced to a Hong Kong-based arts company Art Incorporated Limited (AIL) in later 2016 and claimed she was able to procure them a sculpture by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, entitled Yellow Pumpkin, whose owner is unknown.

In May 2017, after the sale had been agreed, AIL transferred 1.275 million dollars to Gulbenkian’s personal bank account. However, the artwork was never delivered.