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.