Generations and geographies apart, few things could divide two artists more than Tom Wesselmann and Tomokazu Matsuyama, yet both work with and elaborate on the same iconography of Pop. One immortalized, through the elevated language of painting, the emerging symbolic lexicon of a glamorized American consumer culture, the other playfully elaborates on the eclectic visual language that emerged as mass media and consumer culture colonized the global imagination, with symbols colliding with existing local mythologies and cultural signifiers to create a new, consumerism-driven syncretism.
With the rare public opening of the Cooper Square studio where Wesselmann worked during the last 10 years of his life, from 1994 to 2004, Japanese artist Tomokazu Matsuyama is currently presenting his own work in dialogue with selected pieces by the Pop artist. The resulting encounter reveals not only the affinities in their appropriation-based approaches but also the evolution of the symbolic iconography of popular culture as it spread around the globe.
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“Wesselmann x Matsuyama“ |
Presented by the Estate of Tom Wesselmann with the support of Almine Rech, “Wesselmann x Matsuyama” is accessible by appointment to small groups through Sept. 27. This is not the first time the Japanese-born, New York-based artist has confronted the work of the Pop artist: the conversation began with “Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann & …” at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, one of the largest presentations of Wesselmann’s work in recent years. Curators Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer deliberately showed Wesselmann in dialogue with artists of his own generation as well as subsequent generations, including Mickalene Thomas, Derrick Adams and Matsuyama, to help viewers understand the art-historical context of his paintings and the continuing relevance of his inquiry into the language of Pop.
That was when Matsuyama floated the idea of an exhibition in Wesselmann’s studio. The family initially approached the proposal with some hesitation, but over a year of conversations came to understand how such an exhibition could offer a new perspective on Wesselmann’s practice. Walking through the show, Matsuyama explained that the Paris exhibition and the studio project presented very different challenges. In the former, he was commissioned to make three large works for a curator-led exhibition and had to study Wesselmann’s practice in depth; in New York, he had roughly 100 works to choose from. “I had to be the curator,” he said. Working in close collaboration with the estate, he selected six Wesselmann works, paired them with six of his own and produced three new pieces specifically for the roughly 3,500-square-foot studio presentation.
Jeffrey Sturges, the estate director, provided Matsuyama with about 200 pages of printed reference material tracing Wesselmann’s appropriations. From that, he sought to understand how Wesselmann’s approach to borrowing imagery related to his own. “There were two things I had to read: how I would connect Wesselmann’s version of appropriation with my version of appropriation, and how to create a further dialogue, as I was having an exhibition in somebody else’s studio,” he reflected, pointing out how all the desks and materials have remained as Wesselmann left them in 2004, almost as if he were still alive and still in the room watching him. “I decided to call Wesselmann ‘Tom’ and pretend I was his friend, just knocking on the door, making some text messages and saying, ‘Hey, can I bring some work and just hang out? Let’s have a little party.’ That’s how I organically conceived this exhibition.”
Matsuyama began his research in dialogue with Sturges and the family to better understand how Wesselmann’s practice evolved. “You can see Wesselmann’s progression: he starts figurative, loosens up, isolates components, becomes more graphic, makes huge monumental objects, then moves toward abstraction and becomes more sculptural,” Matsuyama reflected while the works were still in progress. “There was always something I could tie into. And there’s also the craft. I go into details, and I think a lot of people don’t pay enough attention to how great a craftsman Wesselmann was. Those dialogues connected organically.”
The challenge was to bring a career that began in the 1960s, with its relentless semiotic investigation of the visual and symbolic lexicon of mass media, into dialogue with the new works he was making in 2026. In those new works, Matsuyama drew directly on two recurring ideas at the heart of Wesselmann’s practice: the use of art-historical references and the shaped canvas, through which painting becomes object.
In his practice, Matsuyama has pursued a strategy of appropriation, extracting globally pervasive elements of American consumer culture to merge them with more sophisticated references to Japanese prints and centuries-old artistic traditions, as well as nods to key moments and iconic images from art history. As in Wesselmann’s work, distinctions between high and low culture dissolve within a single, intentionally hybrid composition: advertising fragments and mass-market cereal brands coexist with luxury brand logos and imagery drawn from interior design magazines, all interwoven with references spanning the history of art.
In Skin Melt In The Blue (2026), Matsuyama plays with Wesselmann’s appropriation and reinterpretation of Matisse in Sunset Nude with Matisse Odalisque (2003), taking an even more witty and whimsical approach. He looked closely at Wesselmann’s quotations of Matisse, his advertising collages and his treatment of wallpaper, textiles and dancers, then introduced related references into his own maximalist composition. “Tom had already translated Matisse,” he said. “So what’s the point of my translating Matisse again? It’s almost boring. But that’s what Asian culture has done: you see the master, you repaint it, claiming it’s yours. I have to claim this is mine.” He acknowledged that painting a version of Matisse’s dancer had not been easy, as he felt much closer to Picasso, Henri Rousseau and a more naïve style of painting. “The dancer is loosely done, because, I’ll be honest, I’m not so much an obvious Matisse-type painter.”
But Wesselmann’s quotations of Matisse, Matsuyama suggested, were not acts of submission to an earlier master. By enlarging and brightening the borrowed image, the Pop artist declared that he had his own voice and could transform the source. Matsuyama’s own task was to go beyond merely using a historical painting as an easily identifiable symbol.
He used the same approach in appropriating and reinterpreting Wesselmann’s iconic Smokers in Smoke On The
The resultant figure draws on Christ iconography from throughout art history, but here he wears tie-dye hippie clothes, beer in hand, perfectly embodying the iconography of the Californian dream, which has also seen its sunset in recent years. “Along with this activity of consumerism and branding over decades, I wanted to bring in the historical component of Jesus holding a Budweiser,” he said, noting how the smoker is also a cultural icon that has faded since Wesselmann’s time. “That was a cultural thing; it was almost an elitist act to smoke. We were able to smoke on the plane. It was everywhere, and it was pretty much a gentleman’s act, this activity of intoxicating yourself through smoking.” The smoke visually joins the smoke in Wesselmann’s painting, crossing from one work into the other, Matsuyama achieving transparent overlays with contemporary airbrush techniques, whereas Wesselmann had created comparable effects in oil paint.
In his continuous free play with appropriation and cultural remix, iconic works by Josef Albers, Morris Louis and Motherwell become miniature decorative posters hanging in the sumptuously exuberant interior of Juvenile Garden (2025). As is often the case in Matsuyama’s practice, the work draws on his study of the visual language of interior design and lifestyle magazines and the way their elaborate photo shoots shape new aesthetic canons. “I was looking at how celebrities place things,” he said. “I wondered: when does art become part of an interior? I’m not saying this negatively, but some works can also function well that way, just in terms of colors and playfulness.”
Freedom of appropriation in contemporary image culture feels all the more relevant with the advent of A.I. and generative image-making. As images and cultural symbols circulate increasingly detached from their original contexts, they risk being reduced to decorative elements within an endlessly expanding, increasingly mediated visual vocabulary. Generative A.I. takes this a step further: images can now be appropriated, manipulated and recreated indefinitely, often without any direct engagement with the cultural histories or symbolic meanings they once embodied. If the original symbolic source becomes irrelevant, and even the creative intention behind an image can no longer be taken for granted, what remains of its ability to signify, or to change its meaning entirely?
Just as Wesselmann’s original operation replicated commercial billboards and translated them into grandiose dimensions through the elevated language of oil painting, Matsuyama’s laboriously meticulous repainting and re-rendering of the elements constituting the global language of consumerism draws attention back to the dynamics at play: how these images become signifiers capable of shaping the collective imagination of entire generations.
Here, both Matsuyama’s and Wesselmann’s works are a wake-up call to the visual and symbolic mechanisms that shape everyday desire, dictate aspirations and influence our systems of value like new forms of mythology. What both artists pursue is a kind of “super reality,” as Wesselmann described it. Only when everyday objects are extracted from their contexts and isolated or monumentalized as cultural artifacts can we begin to see the systems of value and the social and economic dynamics they embody.
At the same time, Matsuyama’s work suggests that cultural symbols do not necessarily lose their meaning when displaced from their original context. Through deliberate layering of references, they acquire new associations and become part of a shared, increasingly global visual language, laying bare the fundamental truth that cultural history has always unfolded through exchanges, contaminations and hybridizations, with boundaries continually blurring and forms constantly being reinvented.
One of the exhibition’s central pairings brings together Wesselmann’s Still Life #35 (1963) and Matsuyama’s We The People (2025). The latter billboard-scale still life, composed of four canvases, monumentalizes idols of American consumerism, turning Royal Crown Cola, Made-Rite bread and a can of Libby’s Beef Stew into something approaching the totemic objects of a new cult. Opposite it, Matsuyama appropriates a Neoclassical masterpiece, The Death of Socrates (1787) by Jacques-Louis David, relocating the scene inside a brightly lit supermarket overflowing with the abundance of American consumerism. Here, Socrates’ poisonous drink becomes the sugar in the ultra-processed, beautifully packaged foods we consume.
“When we go to the supermarket, we’re fascinated by our lifestyle because we have options to select from. That’s still the American fantasy of building this community and culture,” Matsuyama said, pointing out how, directly opposite the supermarket products, are the pharmaceuticals and opioids we then take to keep going. “Over time, by consuming all this sugar, we go through lifestyle diseases, and then we go back to the same place, now for pharmaceutical-branded products. The supermarket and pharmacy are the same now. We don’t know which is the poison now. That’s the fun part.”
The whole cycle of life, he quipped, happens within the supermarket: “I’m from Japan; we believe in reincarnation. This now happens in the supermarket. But I’m not criticizing because this type of social commentary is a form of connection. I still get excited when I go to the supermarket and see products all around me. I feel rich in my heart because I have an option. This is how I relate to being here for 25 years, coming as a self-taught painter. I think I finally have a statement I can make.”
As with Wesselmann’s work, the show directs attention toward the narratives enacted through the cycle of consumption and marketing itself, and how these have shaped new habits and value systems that have penetrated deeply into society, both within and beyond America.
Wesselmann registered the transformation of consumer culture into a social ideology decades earlier. As Sturges noted, artists such as Wesselmann were anticipating, in the 1960s, the media world we inhabit today. His was probably the first generation of artists to focus on it so directly and incorporate it into painting, and it was no longer possible to separate the fine-art world from the world of Pop, since images had already begun to incorporate and embody that same value system.
Matsuyama reflected that, back in the ’70s, America was experiencing a period of enormous economic growth, largely unaware of the darker side to come: “The quest for idols, for points of reference, for something to believe in is what both pop culture and Pop Art ultimately express. Now we’re going to this last generation stage, like: Where do we fit? What do we belong to?”
This dialogue, spanning more than 60 years of art interacting with popular culture, leaves us with an important realization: the shifting world may now require a radical reimagining of our visual and media culture. The continuum between Wesselmann and Matsuyama reveals how the visual language of consumption has evolved into a shared cultural mythology, furnishing the contemporary world with its symbols, objects of desire and aspirational identities. Yet the psychological and sociological implications extend beyond how we consume images to how we construct meaning through them. If the visual language of consumerism has already colonized the global imagination, the advent of generative A.I. raises the possibility of an even more pervasive reiteration of its dominant symbols, aesthetic conventions and underlying value systems. The “Wesselmann x Matsuyama” dialogue, as much as the show in Paris, gives ample food for thought. Under these new homogenizing pressures of collective systems amplified by A.I., the most relevant human challenge is no longer simply to generate new images, but to recover the capacity to question the meanings we have inherited, and to imagine those we have yet to create.