Yoko Matsumoto
(1936)
‘Colour determines form and form depends on colour’. The stance of the Japanese artist Yoko Matsumoto immerses us in the heart of her art, in which colours and forms are combined, creating a maelstrom that occupies the entire pictorial space.
Yoko Matsumoto was born in 1936 in Tokyo. After the war she attended a school of art; during this period, she discovered Western painting and abstraction, which was already very popular in Japan.
At the end of the 1960s, she moved to New York, where she discovered painters such as Mark Rothko, Morris Louis, and Clyfford Still, who greatly influenced her pictorial work. She used acrylic paint which she applied to large-format works, a technique which provided her with new opportunities. Her paintings, which are freely executed and full of energy, draw their inspiration from natural elements light, water, and the wind.
Later in her career, she abandoned her approach inspired by the wind in favour of a more naturalistic form of expression, in which plants and water were at the centre of her work. New, darker colours and a less transparent facture propelled her art into a more earthly but equally dreamlike world.
Yoko Matsumoto is one of the major Japanese abstract artists who draw inspiration from Western art while expressing their oriental culture.
Personal exhibitions
—2007 – Hino gallery, Tokyo, Japan
2005 – Hino gallery, Tokyo, Japan
2003 – Kimora Art Space, Tokyo, Japan
– Gallery Terashita, Tokyo, Japan
2002 – Akira Ikeda Gallery, Nagoya, Japan
2000 – Mitsubishi Matsuyama, Ehime, Japan
1999 – Akira Ikeda Gallery, Nagoya, Japan
1996 – Akira Ikeda Gallery, Nagoya, Japan
1993 – Ishiya-cho Gallery, Kyoto, Japan
1992 – Akira Ikeda Gallery, Nagoya, Japan
1991 – Muramatsu Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
– Goethe Institute Düsseldorf, Dusseldorf, Germany
1990 – Art Site, Fukui, Japan
1988 – Kamakura Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
1987 – Gallery Haku, Osaka, Japan
1986 – Kohji Ogura Gallery, Nagoya, Japan
1985 – Gallery Haku, Osaka, Japan
1983 – Gallery Haku, Osaka, Japan
1982 – Kamakura Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
1980 – Contemporary Art Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan
1978 – Koh Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
1977 – Shirota Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
1974 – Shirota Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
1972 – Flannel Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
1967 – Akiyama Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
1965 – Akiyama Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
1961 – Gallery Sato, Tokyo, Japan
Public exhibitions
—– Okura Garden Hotel Shanghai, China
– Aichi Prefectural Museum, Japan
– Iwaki City Art Museum, Fukushima, Japan
– Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama, Japan
– Ohara Museum of Art(Kurahiki), Japan
– National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan
– Takamatsu Art Museum, Japan
– Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art, Japan
– Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan
– Fukuyama Museum of Art, Hiroshima, Japan
– Saito memorial Kawaguchi Museum of Contemporary Art, Saitama, Japan