Teruko Yokoi: A Pacific Line at James Fuentes, Los Angeles, brings together paintings and works on paper made between 1954 and 2005. Teruko Yokoi's first solo exhibition in the city in more than forty years, it returns attention to the West Coast, where Teruko began her life outside Japan.
Teruko arrived in San Francisco in 1954 to study at the California School of Fine Arts. Painted that year, Pose retains a recognizable figure, though its contours begin to loosen into brushwork and patches of color. Her subsequent studies with Hans Hofmann in New York brought her into close contact with Abstract Expressionism. She continued to draw on the calligraphy and poetry she had learned from her father, finding her own way through the approaches to painting she encountered.
Shizen–Natur (1960), painted during her years in Paris and exhibited at Minami Gallery in Tokyo in 1961, gives a tilted diamond a central place in the composition. This shape would recur throughout her career. After settling in Bern in 1962, Yokoi returned often to forests, flowers and changing light, subjects she had observed since childhood.
The exhibition also follows her experiments with materials. Oils on paper connect the earlier canvases with her sustained work in egg tempera from the mid-1970s onward. In Meditation (1976), metallic passages respond to changes in light and the viewer’s position. The larger diptych Ohne Titel (1993) and the later Baume works (2005) extend her use of vertical space, a format she associated with nature’s reach from earth to sky.
Presented from September 19 through November 7, 2026, A Pacific Line is organized by James Fuentes in collaboration with Emerald Room | Emerald Editions and Kent Fine Art.
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