Teruko Yokoi – Selected Readings

Kunsthalle Basel, 1964
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Walter Bodmer/Otto Tschumi/Teruko Yokoi
Curated by A. Rudinger 40 pp.
33 paintings exhibited / 6 illustrated
 
Teruko Yokoi. Tokyo/New York/Paris/Bern
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Essays by Anke Kempkes, Osamu Okuda, Nina Zimmer et all.
The art and life of Japanese abstract painter Teruko Yokoi (born 1924) subverts the well-worn narratives of abstract expressionism in the US, Europe and Japan. Having studied modern art in Tokyo after World War II, in 1953 she relocated to San Francisco, a vibrant (if still critically neglected) hub for abstract painting, and entered the California School of Fine Arts, where only a few years earlier the influential Pacific School had begun to form. She then moved to New York where she studied with Hans Hoffman at the Art Student League, and began to create the beautifully colorful canvases, with their allusions to landscapes and floral motifs, for which she has become celebrated.
Berlin: Hatje Cantz (Bilingual Edition 2020) in collaboration with the Kunstmuseum, Bern. 163 pp. ISBN: 978-3775746823

TERUKO YOKOI by Anke Kempkes
This publication was prepared on the occasion of the exhibition Teruko Yokoi, which marks the first presentation of the Japanese painter in the United States since 1955.. Arriving in San Francisco in 1954, Yokoi spent a formative year at the California School of the Fine Arts entrenched in a milieu of artists and writers, developing 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 that same year. Yokoi, Francis, and their daughter Kayo resided in the penthouse of the Chelsea Hotel alongside vanguards such as Joan Mitchell. At this juncture, Yokoi’s work grew increasingly concerned with the use of color, with the artist producing works that put varying colors in conversation with one another.
In 1960, Yokoi moved to Paris, 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.
New York: Marlborough Gallery. c 2024. 119 pp., 51 color plates
ISBN: 978-0-89797-456-1
 
Brooklyn Rail, April 2024
ArtSeen: Teruko Yokoi by Elizabeth Buhe
 
ARTFORUM, May 2024, Vol. 62, No. 9
Uncanny Sensation: Teruko Yokoi’s Search for Lost Time
By Richard Speer