Describing her own paintings as “poems written in colors,” Teruko Yokoi (1924-2020) recalled that as a child, her father would take her on walks on hills to collect haikus, rather than rocks or sticks. This sensibility of transmuting nature into abstract forms became an important cornerstone for her practice, as seen in this present work Summer night - 2 from 1989. After gaining recognition for her works in New York and Paris in the 1950s and early 1960s, Yokoi returned to Japan but found that the landscapes and hills she had loved and remembered from her past were gone at the expense of postwar urbanization. As a result, she settled in Bern, Switzerland for fifty-eight years until her death in 2020; Switzerland’s mountains and proximity to nature suited the artist. Deeply elegiac and poetic, Yokoi’s works were described last year in Artforum by Richard Speer as “distilling the ache known in Swiss German as Häiwee: homesickness, a yearning for times and places that cannot be revisited, except perhaps through poems and paintings.” 



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. She often infused her compositions with recurring motifs, such as crescents (as seen here in Summer night - 2), soft-edged diamonds, or criss-crossed lines. Having married the American artist Sam Francis in 1958, Yokoi moved into the vibrant artistic community of the Chelsea Hotel, where she set up her studio and raised their young daughter, Kayo. 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. 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. 



Born in Japan in 1924, Yokoi trained in traditional Japanese painting before exploring European abstract art and moved to San Francisco in the wake of WWII in 1953. As one of two Japanese students at the California School of Fine Arts, she 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.