Teruko Yokoi b. 1924, Tsushima, Japan - d. 2020, Bern, Switzerland

Teruko Yokoi’s story is one of courage and tenacity. She arrived in the United States of America as an outsider and persevered through barriers of race and gender. Yokoi was born in 1924 in Tsushima City, near Nagoya, Aichi, Japan, and from a young age was exposed to a variety of different artistic influences. The daughter of a calligraphist and poet, Yokoi began taking painting lessons, and in 1949, relocated to Tokyo to become a student of the renowned painter Takanori Kinoshita. She soon developed a fervor for European contemporary art, and in the wake of World War II, Yokoi received a scholarship to attend the California School of Fine Arts (later renamed San Francisco Art Institute). Arriving in 1954, Yokoi spent a formative year entrenched in a milieu of artists and writers. As one of two Japanese students entrenched in a milieu of artists and writers, Yokoi swiftly turned further towards abstraction, creating works which responded to a distinctly modern visual language.

Upon receiving a grant for her studies in 1955, Yokoi moved to New York and enrolled in the school of the legendary German Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann. It was during this time that Yokoi met Kenzo Okada, an Abstract Expressionist Japanese-born painter working in America, who moved from Tokyo to New York in 1950. Okada, among many others, became friends with Mark Rothko, whom he introduced to Yokoi. In 1957, Yokoi met Sam Francis and the couple married in 1959 and welcomed their daughter while they resided in the penthouse of the Chelsea Hotel. In 1960, Yokoi moved to Paris where she came to know Joan Mitchell and Shirley Jaffee, and from abroad, participated in a group exhibition at the storied Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. It was in Paris where she would meet Arnold Rüdlinger, a meeting that would lead to her first major museum exhibition in Basel at the Kunsthalle in 1964. In 1962, the artist permanently relocated to Bern, Switzerland, where she would remain until her death in 2020.

Formally, Yokoi’s work combines elements of American modern abstraction with traditional elements of Japanese figuration and poetry. Her earliest abstract works created during her time in San Francisco evoke a distinctly metropolitan, modern sensibility. After her move to New York, Yokoi grew increasingly concerned with the use of color, producing works that put varying colors in direct conversation with one another. Beginning in 1958, a shift took place in Yokoi’s work, resulting in a dramatization of composition, surface treatment, and choice of color. The fields of color allude to the natural environment, yet, in keeping with the traditional style of Japanese landscape painting, remain flat enough to evoke a Greenbergian late-modernist approach as exemplified in Abstract Expressionism. The fact that Yokoi filtered much of her imagery through her memories of a no-longer-extant prewar Japan complicates that temporality further, tempering our confidence in the predictable shift of the seasons with awareness that even those things that seem most enduring will one day be irretrievably lost. Yokoi’s paintings preserve this transmuted reality, along with the knowledge that the only real certainty is the flickering glimmer of change. In the catalogue for Yokoi’s 2020 retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Bern, art historians Kuniko Satonobu Spirig and Osamu Okuda note that in Japan the diamond was an emblem for samurai families, and that Yokoi reported feeling self-conscious as a child when discussing a legendary samurai who belonged to a family that was rival to her own. We might thus imagine the diamond in her paintings as embodying, more generally, the exclusion Yokoi experienced as a Japanese woman painting in the predominately white male milieu of American abstraction.

Yokoi has held over ninety solo exhibitions beginning with the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco; Martha Jackson Gallery, New York; Galerie Kornfeld, Bern; and a recent exhibition with Marlborough Gallery, New York in 2024. Her last major retrospective entitled Teruko Yokoi. Tokyo-New York-Paris-Bern was presented by the Kunstmuseum in Bern in 2020. In 2004, the Teruko Yokoi Hinageshi Museum was founded in Ena, Gifu, followed by the Teruko Yokoi Fuji Museum of Art in Shizuoka in 2008.