Born in 1936, Thomas Yeo is regarded as a key proponent of abstract painting in Singapore since the 1960s. Yeo began his formal art education at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts from 1958-1960. Upon completion, he pursued further art education at the Chelsea School of Art in London from 1960 – 1961 and, later, the Hammersmith College of Art and Architecture, London from 1961 – 1964. In the 1960s, Yeo actively exhibited with artists from London and around the region in group shows such as Young Commonwealth Artists (1962) at the RBA Gallery, Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy (1965) and the Young Modern Painters at the Oxford Gallery (1968). During a brief return to Singapore in 1966, he held his landmark solo exhibition The New Image at the National Library, Singapore, and also participated in exhibitions at the Alpha Gallery. Yellow Rider was painted shortly before Yeo returned to Singapore from his studies abroad. It is representative of his semi-abstract paintings executed in the late 1960s, which explore colour and spatial organisation along a vertical-horizontal axial scheme. The painting depicts two horsemen through a convergence of shapes, colours and lines which appear to move languidly along axial coordinates, as if on the verge of collapsing into its own chromatic relationships. Of his works, Yeo has said that they “[don’t] solve problems, it creates questions”.
