Tatsuno was born in Nagano prefecture, Japan in 1950, and died in 2014. She graduated in 1972 as a major in Oil Painting from the Department of Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts, and received her MFA in Oil Painting, from the Graduate School of Fine Arts of the same university in 1974. While Tatsuno is now highly regarded as one of Japan’s foremost abstract painters, during the first stage of her career in the 1970s, the majority of her work in fact comprised silkscreen prints or drawings. Coinciding with the emergence of Minimalism in the international art scene, the grid-based style of Tatsuno’s early years often demonstrates orientational shifts similar to prominent artists in the transitional period of Abstract Expressionism/Minimalism, such as Agnes Martin. Just as Tatsuno describes her own work as “repetition and linkage,” the use of grids and decorative motifs shows—as is self-evident if one refers to Warhol (the standard-bearer of Pop Art and Tatsuno’s first experience of contemporary art)—a resonance between Pop Art and Minimalism that lies in the necessity of reevaluating the pictoriality that emerges from the “repetition” of things in a homogeneous pattern, that is, the “linkage” of layering prints on a flat surface. The concept of a plate or other matrix in printmaking is not dissimilar to the “flatness” of painting, and throughout her life Tatsuno engaged with a kind of abstract expression that could have arisen from this accord. She was the youngest artist to hold a solo exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo in 1995, and has been highly acclaimed throughout her career, both in Japan and overseas.