Yoko Matsumoto Japanese, b. 1936

Yoko Matsumoto is a Japanese abstract painter best known for her rigorously structured geometric compositions that explore perception, repetition, and spatial rhythm. Based in New York since the 1960s, Matsumoto developed a distinctive visual language grounded in hard-edge abstraction and Minimalism, characterized by precision, restraint, and sustained visual inquiry.

Born in Japan, Matsumoto moved to the United States in the early 1960s and studied at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Her artistic development coincided with a period of intense experimentation in Minimalism, Op Art, and Color Field painting. While her work engages with these movements, Matsumoto pursued an independent path, emphasizing systematic structure and perceptual nuance over expressive gesture.

Matsumoto’s paintings are defined by repeated geometric units—often grids, bands, or rectilinear forms—executed with exacting clarity. Using limited palettes and subtle tonal variation, she creates compositions that appear stable yet optically active, encouraging prolonged engagement. Her work foregrounds perception itself, as small shifts in color and spacing produce visual movement across the surface.

Working serially, Matsumoto allows incremental changes to unfold across bodies of work. This disciplined approach aligns her practice with Minimalist and Conceptual strategies while maintaining a strong visual and material presence. Her paintings reward close looking, revealing complexity through repetition, balance, and restraint.

Matsumoto has exhibited extensively in New York and internationally, including solo exhibitions at galleries committed to postwar abstraction. Although her work developed outside the most visible commercial narratives of Minimalism, it has received increasing attention in reassessments of women artists working in geometric abstraction.

Today, Yoko Matsumoto is recognized as an important contributor to postwar abstract painting. Her work is held in significant public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.