Barbara Takenaga
[1][2][3] She gained wide recognition in the 2000s, as critics such as David Cohen and Kenneth Baker placed her among a leading edge of artists renewing abstraction with paintings that emphasized visual beauty and excess, meticulous technique, and optical effects.
[23][24][6] She often begins with splashy, faux-Abstract Expressionist grounds, before methodically but intuitively applying hand-painted forms to create patterns; the process is informed by her early printmaking background and employs a flat, graphic approach that includes tracing, transferring, outlining, and pooling paint.
[31][3][4] Feathery swirls in Wave (2002) suggest studies of ornate, autonomous systems evoking both decorative cross-cultural and scientific imagery; later works resemble vibrant cellular or bubble forms (Rubazu), bulbous spiraled microorganisms (Tarazed #1), and jeweled mandala or Paisley patterns (Gold + Red).
[30][24][2] She renewed her interest in ambitiously scaled, horizontal work in the panoramic triptychs Rise/Fall and Forte (2011), Diptych (Ikat) (2012), and later, Nebraska (2015, MASS MoCA), a 110-foot mural that repeated a dizzying, hand-painted wallpaper pattern reminiscent of a snowy, furrowed field under a distant blue sky.
[23][14] She has also continued to expand her associative range to include northern lights, meteor showers (Night Painting (JFM), 2016), geodes and fractals, in work that Ken Johnson describes as viewed more "through the ecstatic, possibly pharmaceutically aided perceptions of a hippie dreamer" than "the technologically assisted eyes of a scientist.
"[35][36][37] Takenaga's paintings in the shows "Outset" (2018) and "Manifold" (2019) at DC Moore Gallery employ austere, contemplative palettes (black, iridescent white, silvery gray and blue) and bolder, shifting figure-ground relationships featuring large, dark shapes like holes in the images (e.g., Aeaea; Hello).
[38][39][40] Their mysterious forms draw widely—on classical Japanese art, scientific imagery and mid-century abstraction—and leave behind her fields, tarmacs and horizon lines for more confrontational, turbulent references to explosions, space travel, drifting land masses, and microbiology, evoking a world of constant pressure and relentless change.
[10][8][41] Works such as the sprawling, five-panel Manifold 5 use abstracted silhouette imagery (a river, clouds, robes, elephants, votive candles, geyser forms) taken from Japanese screens and other Eastern sources; they function as patterns or dark grounds flipping between positive shapes and negative space.
[23] Her graduate studies focused on printmaking and took place against a backdrop of 1970s post-psychedelic consciousness raising, interest in the Eastern thought and second-wave feminism; they culminated in a 52-foot, gridded mural-installation, Here to Here, Sense and Nonsense (1978), composed of several dozen abstract-patterned lithographs.
[44][20][23] The Long Resonance (1991) is a representative work; it features a cloud-like expanse breaking into a dark, rectangular ground decorated with icons, silhouettes (animals or Japanese figures) and garlands of red, dotted lines that presage her future paintings.
