Describing her own paintings as “poems written in colors,” Teruko Yokoi (1924-2020) often wandered the hills near her home in Japan as a child, with her father, a calligrapher and poet who taught her both art forms. At a time when it was difficult to move in the art world as a single young Japanese woman, Yokoi was one of the few women artists embedded in the 1950s New York milieu of Abstract Expressionism. Through friendships with Joan Mitchell, Kenzo Okada, and Mark Rothko, Yokoi developed her unique, masterful integration of lyrical abstraction and East Asian landscape. Her works dazzle with an autumnal atmosphere of hushed, immaculate beauty. 



By the late 1950s, Teruko was living and working in the penthouse apartment at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. Having married the American artist Sam Francis in 1958, Teruko had moved into the vibrant artistic community of the Chelsea Hotel, where she set up her studio and raised their young daughter, Kayo, who was born in the summer of 1959. By 1960, she had moved to Paris with Francis and expanded her practice to include works on paper, several of which were exhibited that year at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, marking her emergence as a rising artist on the New York scene. Though her and Francis’s marriage was artistically symbiotic, Yokoi’s work was eclipsed at the time by the attention given to the rising success of Francis. Upon separating from Francis in 1960, Yokoi settled in Switzerland in 1962, after her early daring trajectory living in Tokyo, San Francisco, New York, and then Paris. 



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.” Yokoi became an integral part of the Swiss art scene, exhibiting regularly and contributing to the dialogue of European abstraction. She remained in Switzerland until her death in 2020. 



Born in Japan in 1924, Yokoi trained in traditional Japanese painting before exploring European abstract art. In 1953, in the wake of World War II, she left Japan for San Francisco. As one of two Japanese students at the California School of Fine Arts, Yokoi turned to abstraction and received many scholarships and grants, one which allowed her to move to New York in 1955 to study with Hans Hofmann. There are two museums dedicated to Yokoi’s work in Japan: Teruko Yokoi Hinageshi Museum (opened in 2004), and Teruko Yokoi Fuji Museum of Art in Shizuoka (opened in 2008). 



A prolific and indefatigable artist, Yokoi has had over ninety exhibitions, including two solo shows at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, as well as group shows at Martha Jackson Gallery, New York; Galerie Kornfeld, Bern; and Marlborough Gallery, New York. Her last major retrospective entitled “Teruko Yokoi: Tokyo—New York—Paris—Bern” was presented by the Kunstmuseum in Bern in 2020.