Year: 1995
Medium: acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: 193 x 259 cm (76 x 102 in.)
Acquired from Hino Gallery, 2022
This work is a representative piece from a series featuring the entire canvas being painted in pink as the basic tone. When confronting this large F200-size canvas, the viewer may feel as if the entire body is being swallowed up in the vague world of painting. Treating pink as the central theme in painting is rare among Abstract Expressionist painters. For Matsumoto, who studied in New York in the 1960s when color field artists were rising, their all-over composition and the use of acrylic paint and raw canvas had a profound influence on her subsequent production activities. Matsumoto was one of the earliest artists in Japan to challenge Abstract Expressionism, which was still immature in the country. She established pink as her signature color, a brilliant color that was unique to acrylic paint, which was still a new painting medium at the time. This outstanding foresight along with the artistry is something that should be recognized. In this work, the pink color spreads beautifully across the entire picture. The image of “generating and destroying” abstracted from the pink color embodies the color field that Matsumoto has digested in her mind. This work was introduced as one of her major works showing its importance in both the exhibition “Today’s Artists” at the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura in 2005 and “The Light: MATUSMOTO Yoko / NOGUCHI Rika” held as two solo exhibitions at the National Art Center, Tokyo in 2009. This work was exhibited on loan from the Ueshima collection in the exhibition “Passport to Shangri-La” at the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama in 2022.
