Kent Fine Art, in conjunction with Upstate Art Weekend, is pleased to present TERUKO YOKOI Hinageshi Poppies.
Yokoi enjoyed a pastoral childhood, wandering the hills outside Nagoya with her father, a calligrapher and poet who instructed her in both art forms. The pair frequently ventured out on what he called haiku hiroi (haiku-gathering) expeditions, soaking up impressions of the natural world to transliterate into poetry. She later described her paintings as "poems written in colors.” There, one morning while walking to her studio, she had a mystical experience. She felt an uncanny sensation of cold wind blowing through her entire body, as if she were porous and transparent. Somehow, this reawakened her idyll of Old Japan, which she called "my paradise- everything was crystal clear from the mountains down to the Pacific... even the fish were transparent." It was a turning point in her work. From pure abstraction, her style evolved into semi-abstracted, Japanese-inflected landscapes. Crisscrossing and crescent-shape gestures stood in for grasses, clouds, snow, and poppies. Thin strips of vertical calligraphy, excerpting traditional haiku, sluiced down picture surfaces like raindrops.
In Switzerland beginning in the early 1960s, Yokoi recognized in the country’s pristine landscapes the elements of Japanese landscapes that she had so loved and remembered from her past, but which were, by the 1960s, largely gone at the expense of post-war urbanization. Willy Rotzler, upon Yokoi’s artistic debut in the Swiss art world, described her paintings as “imaginary inner landscapes that do not exist in this form, neither here in the West nor in the Far East… pictorial and metaphorical concentrations of emotive devotion to the unutterable, to the experience.”
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. Once the Covid pandemic travel restrictions were lifted following her death, a special celebration was held at the Thun Castle in Schlossberg featuring her favorite motif, “Poppies”.
On View June 25 – 29, 2026, 10 – 6 pm
July by appointment
