Teruko Yokoi

by Anke Kempes
This monograph was published on the occasion of the first exhibition in New York of this historic Japanese painter well known in Switzerland. 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.