Inside the Issue

In April, 2023, the staff of Ursula magazine asked the artist Takesada Matsutani if he would be interested in creating a new artwork specially for the cover of our fall/winter edition. Matsutani, 86, has lived and worked in Paris since the late 1960s, but he came of age as an artist in Osaka, Japan, as a member of the avant-garde Gutai movement and he has long worked in highly experimental ways with printmaking and artist’s books.

Only a few weeks after we posed our question, an impromptu iPhone video arrived from Matsutani’s studio showing him leafing gingerly through not one but three striking new artworks he had created as proposals for the cover—each one a folding three-part collage with holes hand-cut through the front, forming a kind of peekaboo page-turner. After a few days of agonizing deliberation, we chose his second proposal, Eyes, which has now become Ursula’s first artist-commissioned bespoke cover, a true keeper for magazine fans. Here, we proudly present all three of Matsutani’s works for the cover, each an artist’s book of its own.