Exhibition preview·Global
Teruko Yokoi's blooming abstractions, overlooked in her lifetime, draw new attention
Japanese-born painter Teruko Yokoi, who moved between Tokyo, San Francisco, New York, Paris and Bern and blended Abstract Expressionism with Japanese tradition, is the focus of renewed gallery attention in New York and Los Angeles.
The late Japanese-born painter Teruko Yokoi is receiving a fresh wave of attention, decades after she worked at the edges of the post-war New York art world. An Artsy feature published on 28 October traces her career through two current gallery presentations, arguing that paintings she once described as poems written in colours are only now finding the audience they deserve.
Yokoi was born in 1924 in Tsushima, near Nagoya, and grew up with a father who was a calligrapher and poet. After studying in Tokyo, she won a scholarship to the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in the mid-1950s, then moved to New York, where she studied with Hans Hofmann and mixed with Joan Mitchell, Kenzo Okada and Mark Rothko. In 1958 she married the American artist Sam Francis and lived in the Chelsea Hotel, before moving to Paris and finally settling in Bern, Switzerland, in 1962, where she remained until her death in 2020.
Her work refuses a single label. Colour and calligraphic gesture carry the influence of Abstract Expressionism, yet the paintings stay rooted in Japanese landscape tradition, seasonal feeling and the flatness of Japanese picture-making. At Hollis Taggart in New York, works such as Pfirsichblumen from 1966 evoke flowering without fixing blossoms into recognisable outlines, while later paintings including Autumn light from 1976 and June from 1989 distil seasonal impressions into shifting colour, rounded forms and carefully measured intervals. Three 1966 works from her Bern years will also appear in the gallery's booth at the ADAA Art Fair in November.
A parallel show at James Fuentes Gallery in Los Angeles, titled A Pacific Line and running through 7 November 2026, gathers work from 1954 to 2005 and charts the same transpacific path.
The renewed interest also reflects a broader market and curatorial turn toward overlooked women of post-war abstraction. The current shows offer a chance to correct that, presenting a body of work shaped by movement between cultures and by a lifelong sensitivity to nature's changing seasons.
