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Inside Tom Wesselmann’s Studio, Tomokazu Matsuyama Considers Pop’s Afterlife

Left largely untouched since 2004, the space is hosting a short-lived exhibition in which Matsuyama pairs his own work with the Pop artist’s in a dialogue on consumer culture, visual excesses and appropriation.

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.

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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.

"Wesselmann x Matsuyama" Artists: Tom Wesselmann and Tomokazu Matsuyama Venue: Tom Wesselmann's studio Address: Cooper Square, New York, NY Through: September 27, 2026, by appointment only

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........

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