Born in Nagano Prefecture in 1950, Toeko Tatsuno graduated from the Department of Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts, at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (the current Tokyo University of the Arts) with a major in oil painting, and went on to complete the master’s program in graduate studies there. In the 1970s, she attracted attention with her print works using grids and stripes as motifs, and since the 1980s, she has pursued her own unique style of depicting organic forms in rich colors, demonstrating the new possibilities of abstract painting. In 1996, she was awarded the Art Encouragement Prize for New Artists by the Minister of Education of Japan.
The main exhibitions at which she showed works are as follows: A Perspective on Contemporary Art: Metaphors and/or Symbols (National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and National Museum of Art, Osaka, 1984); Europia ’89 Japan (Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent, Belgium, 1989); Japanese Art after 1945: Scream against the Sky (Yokohama Museum of Art; Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1994); The 22nd Sao Paulo Biennial (1995); Tatsuno Toeko – 1986-1995 (National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 1995); Given Forms: Toeko Tatsuno and Toshio Shibata (National Art Center, Tokyo, 2012); Toeko Tatsuno On Papers: A Retrospective, 1969-2012 (Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, and Nagoya City Art Museum, 2018).