ADAA Fair

Hollis Taggart’s presentation at this year’s ADAA fair features two artists representative of our core program: Michael (Corinne) West and Teruko Yokoi. Both artists were early students of Hans Hofmann and among the few women within the first generation of Abstract Expressionists in New York in the 1950s, despite the movement’s overwhelming valorization of male artists. 

Michael (Corinne) West (1908-1991) was a prolific Abstract Expressionist painter who was at the forefront of dialogues that shaped the movement. One of the first students of Hofmann and a close friend of Arshile Gorky (whose marriage proposals she turned down on multiple occasions), West became active in the New York avant-garde scene beginning in the mid-1940s, exhibiting alongside Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko, amongst others, at the Pinacotheca Gallery. In 1953, West exhibited alongside Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline at the Stable Gallery. She maintained friendships with Richard Pousette-Dart and sculptor Isamu Noguchi and was influenced in the 1950s by the calligraphic approaches of Zen Buddhism and European Art Informel. Throughout her artistic career, West was also a noted poet and essayist whose writings on art outlined contemporary and individual theories on modernism.

Upon relocating to New York in 1955 to study with Hofmann, Japanese-born artist Teruko Yokoi (1924-2020) also found herself in the thick of the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York at a time when it was extraordinarily rare to move through the nascent art world as a single immigrant woman. Through friendships with Joan Mitchell, Kenzo Okada, and Mark Rothko, however, Yokoi developed her unique, masterful integration of lyrical abstraction and East Asian landscape. By the late 1950s, she was living and working in the penthouse apartment at the Chelsea Hotel in New York with her husband, the American artist Sam Francis. There, she forged a life within the vibrant artistic community of the Chelsea Hotel, where she set up her studio and raised their young daughter, Kayo. 

Despite their radically different backgrounds and aesthetic languages, West and Yokoi worked within the same historical moment and shared an emphasis on the painterly process as well as the assertion of the spiritual nature within the language of abstraction. Finding themselves in the newly minted capital of the art world - New York - in the momentous aftermath of World War II, the two women immersed themselves in crucial friendships, galleries, and networks that allowed them to carve out their own distinct identities.

However, despite their substantive participation in the artistic innovations and dialogues that shaped Abstract Expressionism on the ground, their contributions remain on the periphery of art history, like so many women of their time. In line with recent renewed investigations of the critical contributions of female artists within the post-war art historical canon, Hollis Taggart’s exhibitions - including this presentation - of Yokoi and West aim to rectify the omission of their practice within our understanding of Abstract Expressionism.

For more information on the gallery's booth presentation please contact us at +1 212.628.4000 or info@hollistaggart.com.