Tomokazu Matsuyama and Tom Wesselmann Estate Team Up on a Show at the Pop Artist’s New York Studio

The estate of Pop giant Tom Wesselmann has teamed up with Japanese American artist Tomokazu Matsuyama on a first: an exhibition at the East Village studio that Wesselmann occupied in the last decade of his life. Open to the public by appointment through September 27, the show arrives just in time for Armory Week, when thousands of dealers and collectors will converge on the city.

Showing in another artist’s workspace, Matsuyama told me during a visit this week, is a unique experience: “It’s like wearing someone else’s underwear and saying it’s mine!” All around the studio are things Wesselmann touched, not only his artworks but his brushes and paint tubes and even a pair of gloves (handily labeled TR and TL, for Tom right hand and Tom left hand).

The seed for the collaboration was planted when the estate invited Matsumaya to create new works for the 2024 exhibition “Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &…,” at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, which also included contemporary stars like Derrick Adams, Jeff Koons, and Mickalene Thomas. The show, wrote ARTnews’s Sarah Douglas at the time, “takes a clever approach: it is bookended by Wesselmann’s Pop peers and red-hot contemporary artists, giving him a strong association with both.” Wesselmann was everywhere in Paris, Douglas pointed out, with major dealers also offering his works at Art Basel.

Indeed, both artists have a strong market presence. Matsuyama’s auction high stands at $647,125, achieved at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2023; 33 of his works have sold in the six-figure range. Some 65 of Wesselmann’s works have achieved prices north of $1 million, but compared to some of his Pop peers, his $10.7 million auction peak, achieved at Sotheby’s New York in 2008, is relatively modest.

The show consists of seven Wesselmann works, dating from the 60s through to the year before his death in 2004, and five by Matsuyama, all from the last two years. Matsuyama created three works just for the exhibition at the studio, which, the estate’s Jeffrey Sturges told me, measures about 4,000 square feet. Each of the new works closely riffs on Wesselmann’s work and imagery, and all are on shaped canvases, a format in which Wesselmann frequently worked. But if Wesselmann’s works were chock-full of consumer and art historical references, Matsuyama is the same but on steroids, with single works containing images of artworks by historical figures as varied as Henri Matisse, Yves Klein, James McNeill Whistler, Raphael, and Pieter Claesz along with references to artifacts like Japanese textile designs.

A central juxtaposition involves Wesselmann’s 16-foot-wide Still Life #35 (1963), featuring a loaf of supermarket bread, a pack of cigarettes, and a six-pack of Royal Crown cola. Across the studio on a neighboring wall is Matsymaya’s ode to consumer goods, the slightly larger We the People (2025), which quotes Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Socrates (1787), from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, but places the action in the wide aisles of a supermarket, the groceries and medicines painted in loving detail: Greek moral philosophy, expounded at Costco. Socrates is drinking a cup of Froot Loops, a toxic stand-in for the hemlock the philosopher drank. On a shelf behind him are diabetes medications.

“The way Wesselmann appropriated historical art and consumer culture already had a big influence on me,” Matsuyama told me, before he was invited to participate in the Paris show—after which he only did an even deeper dive into his predecessor’s work. “I was surprised at the depth at which you went into it,” Sturges told Matsuyama, who replied, “The research took longer than creating the paintings.” And that is saying something, as his works are incredibly labor-intensive, involving large teams of studio assistants.

Two of the paintings come from Wesselmann’s “Bedroom Paintings” series, fitting for the highly personal studio space. The Pop artist began the series in 1967, and they are marked by close-up views of women’s body parts in combination with everyday things that might appear on a night table. Not just women’s body parts, though; Bedroom Painting #19 (1969) verges on the pornographic, featuring the image of the artist’s own erect penis. (The show is supported by the gallery Almine Rech; for the record, before joining ARTnews, I wrote a press release for the dealer when she mounted a 2025 Wesselmann exhibition that included several of his paintings of his own member.)

The Bedroom Paintings are not only fitting to the setting but are also an especially apropos touchstone for Matsuyama. When he arrived in New York and haunted magazine stores selling interiors publications, he told me, he was amazed at how eager Americans were to expose their homes to others; in his native Japan, domestic spaces are far more private.

On the subject of whether the current show could ever travel, Matsuyama and Sturges were circumspect, since obviously the fun of it partly derives from it happening in Wesselmann’s studio, surrounded by his personal effects. Besides, said Sturges, “You see a lot of shows pairing artists but it’s not always clear what they bring beyond what two solo exhibitions might.”

But he doesn’t seem closed to the idea, saying slyly, of the current show, “It’s a proposal. I think it’s an exciting way to see art.”

“Wesselmann X Matsuyama” is on view by appointment through September 27; the public can email wesselmannxmatsu@gmail.com to request an appointment.