14 june 2021, Flor Linckens
Ruri Matsumoto: “Art works can enrich the viewer's sensitivity.”
Until July 10, Livingstone Gallery in The Hague is showing a series of works by Ruri Matsumoto. This Japanese-German artist creates dynamic works that are characterised by geometric abstraction, but also by a certain expressiveness and spontaneity. She is looking for new possibilities within the medium of painting. Matsumoto's paintings are recognisable by her use of coloured lines. Not straighforward, clean lines, but rather whimsical, unpredictable stripes in various levels of transparency. Sometimes in candy-like colours, sometimes in gamma colours or grayish shades of blue. She usually calls her paintings “Broken Line”, sometimes with a reference to a forest or a metropolis or to the colour types that she used (such as the RGB colour system).
Matsumoto: “Art works can enrich the viewer's sensitivity. I think it is even more important during this COVID-19 pandemic, to connect art with life in order to enrich people's sensitivity.”
The artist uses painter's tape for her unpredictable artistic process, which she usually places on the canvas in preparation before painting. Sometimes, she reverses the process and adds painted tape to the canvas. The process of removing and reapplying tape removes some of the paint, damages it, and under the tape, it allows for some paint to mix in unexpected ways. Coincidence plays a major role in her process. The result is a particularly energetic and exciting composition.
Ruri Matsumoto, Broken Line RGB, 2019, Livingstone gallery.
Matsumoto was born in Tokyo in 1981 and studied at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. In 2013, she obtained a master's degree at the renowned art academy in Düsseldorf, where Joseph Beuys taught in the 1960s and 1970s and where well-known artists such as Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Anselm Kiefer, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky and Candida Höfer completed their studies. Matsumoto studied there under Professor Katharina Grosse, whose work was recently featured in a major solo exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.
Matsumoto has been nominated for several awards and in 2013, she was invited to complete a residency at the Goyang Art Studio of the Seoul National Museum of Contemporary Art in South Korea. The artist also showed her paintings in Kunstmuseum Bonn, among others, and her work has been included in various collections including those of the Rijksmuseum and the AkzoNobel Art Foundation.
Ruri Matsumoto, Line broken black forest, 2020, Livingstone gallery.
