White Cube is pleased to announce representation of Yoko Matsumoto (b.1936, Tokyo), alongside Hino Gallery in Japan. In February, the artist’s painting Edom Becomes Wilderness (1989) will be on view at White Cube’s booth during MAZE Art Gstaad in Switzerland, while Shapes in Nature VI (1986) will be shown at Frieze Los Angeles.
Matsumoto joins the gallery following her UK debut at White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, in January 2024, and a presentation at White Cube New York in June 2024. In spring 2026, the artist will have a major touring retrospective across several Japanese institutions.
Matsumoto’s expressive visual language is dedicated to ‘painting with colour and form alone’. Inspired by Western abstraction and Japanese art, in particular the monochromatic ink drawing practice of suiboku-ga, the artist addresses colour in a processual and meditative manner, with a rigorous use of light, shade and hue.
Born in 1936 in Tokyo, where she continues to live and work, Matsumoto graduated in oil painting from Tokyo University of the Arts in 1960. After a trip to New York in 1967, she became profoundly influenced by the second generation of American Abstract Expressionists and Colour Field painters, such as Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler and Mark Rothko, and discovered materials unavailable in Japan: acrylic paint (Liquitex), a gloss-polymer medium and raw cotton canvas.
Over the next decade, Matsumoto would develop her signature ‘hazy’ style of painting, characterised by thin layers of acrylic pigment and gestural marks, created by way of a physically demanding technique working on the floor during deep periods of concentration.
The artist introduced her best-known pink hues in the 1970s, a colour which she believes resides ‘beneath inexpressible thought’ and has remained at the centre of her practice for over three decades. Matsumoto has continuously explored new colour palettes and techniques, notably incorporating vibrant greens into her later compositions, as well as returning to painting with oil while standing in the early 2000s, when the physical demands of working with acrylics on the floor became too great.
Throughout her 60 year career, Matsumoto’s intuitive approach has resulted in works that transcend traditional representation, embracing accidental and miraculous formations of colour.
