Toeko Tatsuno completed a degree in the oil painting program of the Tokyo University of the Fine Arts Department of Painting during the 1970s and followed by a graduate program at the same institution.
In the 1970s, her interest in minimalism and conceptual art led her to set about creating drawings and printed works based on grid and stripe patterns. However, T. Tatsuno’s experiments were not limited to simple geometrical composition, and in superimposing partially hand-drawn lines onto her grids and stripes, she succeeded in giving form to disruption and disparity in the face of continuity and repetition.

Subsequently, in 1979, T. Tatsuno changed the direction in which her work had, up to that point, been heading. Reconsidering the work of the Abstract Expressionist painters, notably Clyfford Still, she began producing works on canvas. Of the situation at the time, T. Tatsuno later recalled that, “I wanted to create a pictorial space with a sense of true reality; one with no other meaning than just that and possessed of its own singularity. For that reason, I had no choice but to paint. I gave myself wholeheartedly over to the differences of material and colour existing between painted and unpainted surfaces. I gave up on making assumptions, as I had in the past, and attempted to paint anew from ground up, with only the act of painting itself.” True to her words, T. Tatsuno attempted to create spaces that are only possible in painting through the layering of vivid colours on canvas.

In the 1980s, spontaneous images began to appear on her painting surfaces: an S-shaped form reminiscent of plant ivy, a floral pattern taken from a cast-iron staircase in New York, a diamond-shape made up of a rectangles, a circular motif. Through the masterful combination of the linear elements that make up these images with various brushstrokes and colours of differing tones and brightness, the pictorial space of T. Tatsuno’s works slowly transitioned from a complex intersection of flatness and spatiality to a feeling of substantive materiality.

In the 1990s, her painting surfaces began to take on a solid feeling of weight, a virtual three-dimensional object of sorts. Motifs such as combined pairs of U-shaped forms that heavily dominate the centres of painting surfaces, stacks of somewhat distorted columns and parallelepipeds, and rounded shapes create a feeling of gravity rather than of floating. However, though these motifs resembled representations of three-dimensional space, T. Tatsuno realized spatial discontinuity and transition through her subtle manipulation of their form and arrangement, colour and material.
From the 2000s on, T. Tatsuno forged ahead with this course. Rather than reproducing subjects from the outside world, she continued to pursue the possibilities of painting through the gradual construction of layered brushstrokes on canvas.