Describing her own paintings as “poems written in colors,” Teruko Yokoi 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 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. This painting was created in 1960, during a pivotal period when Teruko was living and working in the Penthouse apartment at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. Having married Sam the previous year, the couple had moved into the vibrant artistic community of the Chelsea, where Teruko set up her studio. Despite balancing life with their young daughter, Kayo, born in the summer of 1959, Teruko returned to her studio by early fall that year and began producing some of her most monumental works on canvas. By 1960, she had 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. In Switzerland, Yokoi recognized in its pristine landscapes the characteristics of Japanese landscape that she had so loved and remembered from her past, but by the 1960s, were largely gone at the expense of post-war urbanization. Willy Rotzler, upon Yokoi’s artistic debut in the Swiss art world, described her painting as “an imaginary inner landscape that does 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.” 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. After her separation from Sam Francis, Yokoi permanently moved to Bern, Switzerland in 1962, where she remained until her death in 2020. There are two museums dedicated to Yokoi’s work in Japan: the Teruko Yokoi Hinageshi Museum (2004), and the Teruko Yokoi Fuji Museum of Art in Shizuoka (2008). 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.