Tom Wesselmann's longtime New York studio will open to the public for the first time since the artist's passing. During Armory Week, visitors can step inside the Cooper Square space where the American pop artist made much of his late work, from 1994 to 2004.
Wesselmann built his name on the Great American Nude series and monumental still lifes of commercial products, blowing ordinary objects up to billboard scale and saturating them in color until they felt more vivid than life itself.
To mark the opening, Almine Rech will unveil Wesselmann x Matsuyama, a two-artist exhibition pairing the pop pioneer with Tomokazu Matsuyama, a Japanese-American painter who shares his instinct for spinning everyday imagery into surreal compositions. The gallery frames the pairing as a study in vantage points: Wesselmann reworked postwar America's visual language from inside its own culture, while Matsuyama paints in a world where cultural borders have already blurred, his dense, high-color canvases pulling from ordinary imagery while absorbing the crosscurrents of his time.
The show extends a cross-generational exchange that began at Pop Forever, Wesselmann's 2024 retrospective at Fondation Louis Vuitton, the first exhibition to show the two artists together.
Presented by the Tom Wesselmann Estate and Almine Rech, Wesselmann x Matsuyama is on view September 19th through 27th. The studio itself admits visitors by advance registration only, in timed slots spread across three days of the exhibition.
