![](https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Gallery-Exhibitions/New-York/2024/Yoko-Matsumoto/Yoko-Matsumoto-Darkness-against-Nature-II-1993-high-res-crop-1.jpg?w=960&h=720&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1718637181&s=4f1f76f92ce25494aed21dad9ee2b734 960w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Gallery-Exhibitions/New-York/2024/Yoko-Matsumoto/Yoko-Matsumoto-Darkness-against-Nature-II-1993-high-res-crop-1.jpg?w=1280&h=960&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1718637181&s=c4403dcbc122d850d1442af4930e1e9d 1280w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Gallery-Exhibitions/New-York/2024/Yoko-Matsumoto/Yoko-Matsumoto-Darkness-against-Nature-II-1993-high-res-crop-1.jpg?w=1600&h=1200&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1718637181&s=ca0d59f95d89471f1cbdf665eff908db 1600w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Gallery-Exhibitions/New-York/2024/Yoko-Matsumoto/Yoko-Matsumoto-Darkness-against-Nature-II-1993-high-res-crop-1.jpg?w=2360&h=1770&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1718637181&s=5402fce49dc313dc4ff29ea76d53e75f 2360w)
Yoko Matsumoto, New York (2024)
Yoko Matsumoto
Darkness Against Nature
28 June – 23 August 2024
Dates
28 June – 23 August 2024
Committed to the notion of ‘painting with colour and form alone’, Matsumoto creates immersive compositions in a reduced palette that articulate the primacy of painterly expression.
White Cube is pleased to present Japanese artist Yoko Matsumoto’s second exhibition with the gallery, which brings together works from the 1980s to the present day. ‘Darkness Against Nature’ takes its title from the earliest work included in the exhibition; painted in 1980, the artwork exemplifies the artist’s conceptual concerns, which stem from the agency of colour and the fluidity of paint.
Committed to the notion of ‘painting with colour and form alone’, Matsumoto creates immersive compositions in a reduced palette that articulate the primacy of painterly expression. The turbulent surface of Darkness Against Nature eschews representation, and is instead wrought by dynamic, flowing movement. In it, the upper portion of the canvas is dominated by a dark vortex-like form, surrounded by washes of blues, purples, pinks, greys and whites. Exuding presence, the composition appears to manifest two opposing forces, caught in a chaotic symbiosis or attempting to subsume one another. As the title implies, the work speaks to the immaterial and intangible attributes of nature – light, air, mist, cloud and the endless mutations of shadow – but also the inscrutable depths of interiority.
In this exhibition, the artist returns to the city that played such a pivotal role in the development of this process and instigated her desire to create paintings that ‘no one had ever seen before’. Matsumoto studied oil painting at the Tokyo University of the Arts in the 1950s, where she grappled with the constraints of the medium, wanting to wield her brush ‘freely and paint without restraint’. In 1967 she accompanied her husband, art critic Teruo Fujieda, first to Cleveland and then to New York, where she encountered works by the Abstract Expressionists and Colour Field painters, including Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. There, she also discovered materials unavailable in Japan at the time, such as acrylic paint and unprimed, raw cotton canvas. The experience proved to be formative for the artist, and over the following years she developed a technique that combined the receptiveness of oil paint with the immediacy of acrylic, drawing upon both the lightness of Frankenthaler’s surfaces and the Japanese ink drawing practice of suiboku-ga.
In Matsumoto’s expressive and yet exacting abstraction, colour is a unifying force that determines form. She works without underdrawings or preliminary studies, guided by her materials, the impact of external conditions such as weather and humidity, chance and her own physical movement. Working on the floor with speed, to respond to the vagaries of the fast-drying paint, Matsumoto applies thinned layers to the canvas, before wiping the pigment away with a cloth and repeating the process. The variances in pressure result in a diffusion of colour and light, and connect her with the now-established genre of ‘hazy painting’.
From 1970 onwards, the use of pink became a defining element of her paintings, characterising the majority of her output for three decades. In Field of Midian (1983), swathes of vivid pink intermingle with tones of grey, blue and purple. The surface appears to vibrate, evoking licking flames or violent winds gushing through a landscape. In The Mountains of Ephraim III (1990), deep pinks and purples emerge through undulating, cloud-like masses of more muted tones. For the artist, pink carries with it no particular concept, but rather exists in the ‘innermost depths of our subconscious’, a hue that ‘lies beneath inexpressible thought’.
In the early 2000s Matsumoto returned to the medium that had so troubled her in her early career: oil painting. As she later noted, ‘Though its smell and its stickiness had driven me away long ago, after more than thirty years I came full circle’. This also marked a transition from the use of pink to green, a colour that the artist described as a ‘problematic’ for its inevitable associations with mountains or grassland. Following a desire to create ‘autonomous green paintings’ purely through vivid, saturated pigments, she began to employ viridian and cadmium green. In Thought Circuit III (2006), the jagged and opaque physicality of oil paint predominates, signalling a departure from the soft haziness characterising the artist’s earlier works. Instead, a dense network of dark charcoal, green, orange and white marks suggest routes and pathways which, as the title infers, have to do with cognitive process as much as any natural phenomena.
The exhibition includes two new watercolours created by the artist this year. As with her acrylic works, Matsumoto uses pigment to create overlapping layers; however, here the paint holds its edges, dictated by the rivulets of water that carry it. Strata form on the page – a constellation of nebulous forms and fluid gestures that contrast the dissipation of colour in her works on canvas. Another instance in which she ‘forgets time and space’, these works on paper offer another means through which Matsumoto has engaged physically and psychically with the spatiotemporal realm of painting.
Featured Works
Yoko Matsumoto
Darkness against Nature II, 1993
Price upon request
Yoko Matsumoto
The Mountains of Ephraim III, 1990
Price upon request
![](https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Gallery-Exhibitions/New-York/2024/Yoko-Matsumoto/Yoko-Matsumoto-White-Pole-2011-crop.jpg?w=720&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1718711664&s=df707a8c9be6a0f577c2dbddca4d99fe 720w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Gallery-Exhibitions/New-York/2024/Yoko-Matsumoto/Yoko-Matsumoto-White-Pole-2011-crop.jpg?w=960&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1718711664&s=b064455fb09c07c58f6f6881103ef9a5 960w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Gallery-Exhibitions/New-York/2024/Yoko-Matsumoto/Yoko-Matsumoto-White-Pole-2011-crop.jpg?w=1280&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1718711664&s=020de5a266eb5846f16cb625174896d1 1280w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Gallery-Exhibitions/New-York/2024/Yoko-Matsumoto/Yoko-Matsumoto-White-Pole-2011-crop.jpg?w=1600&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1718711664&s=244908cc226eb2ae5df2dd3675e1cbcd 1600w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Gallery-Exhibitions/New-York/2024/Yoko-Matsumoto/Yoko-Matsumoto-White-Pole-2011-crop.jpg?w=2360&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1718711664&s=5c39aae3f29d673ce92b4e881f73afd8 2360w)
To enquire about available Yoko Matsumoto works
About the artist
![](https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Gallery-Exhibitions/Masons-Yard/2024/Yoko-Matsumoto/Yokomatsumoto.jpg?w=720&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1718706939&s=671245fd3c6b5f8a708b06061b319dc8 720w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Gallery-Exhibitions/Masons-Yard/2024/Yoko-Matsumoto/Yokomatsumoto.jpg?w=960&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1718706939&s=9de3a43cca211560039ac03ed0e5e6b6 960w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Gallery-Exhibitions/Masons-Yard/2024/Yoko-Matsumoto/Yokomatsumoto.jpg?w=1280&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1718706939&s=d2bbc2136663296e99d46e8c8efb1639 1280w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Gallery-Exhibitions/Masons-Yard/2024/Yoko-Matsumoto/Yokomatsumoto.jpg?w=1477&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1718706939&s=e6884049cb6b0d4a43c00230bfd0fc12 1477w)
Image: Yoko Matsumoto painting at her studio in Ongata, Hachioji, Tokyo, in 1982 © artist. Courtesy Hino Gallery and White Cube. Photo © Mikio Kubota; Yoko Matsumoto, ‘Dawning of a New Era’, 2019 © artist. Courtesy Hino Gallery and White Cube Photo © Tadasu Yamamoto.
Yoko Matsumoto (b.1936) lives and works in Tokyo. She studied at the Tokyo University of the Arts and graduated in 1960. Matsumoto has exhibited in major solo and two-person exhibitions, most notably The National Art Center, Tokyo (2009); The National Museum Modern Art, Kamakura, Japan (2005); Goethe Institute, Dusseldorf, Germany, and The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (both 1991). Her work has appeared in numerous museum collections and group exhibitions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2023); The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan (2023); The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan (2022); Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan (2020); The Museum of Modern Art Hayama, Kanagawa, Japan (2011); Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan (1994–1995) and Taipei Fine Art Museum, Taiwan (1986), among others. This exhibition is organised in collaboration with Hino Gallery, Tokyo.
In the Studio
Yoko Matsumoto (1992)
© Yoko Matsumoto. Courtesy Hino Gallery.
Create an Account
To view available artworks and access prices.