Barbara Takenaga

Barbara Takenaga (born 1949) is an American artist known for swirling, abstract paintings that have been described as psychedelic and cosmic, as well as scientific, due to their highly detailed, obsessive patterning. 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. Her work suggests possibilities that range from imagined landscapes and aerial maps to astronomical and meteorological phenomena to microscopic views of cells, aquatic creatures or mineral cross-sections. In a 2018 review, The New Yorker described Takenaga as "an abstractionist with a mystic’s interest in how the ecstatic can emerge from the laborious." Barbara Takenaga, Forte, acrylic on linen, , 2011. Courtesy DC Moore Gallery, New York.

Takenaga has had solo exhibitions at the MASS MoCA Hunter Center, Huntington Museum of Art, Neuberger Museum of Art Space 42, and Art in General, and a twenty-year survey at Williams College Museum of Art in 2017. She has participated in group shows at the Frist Art Museum, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, deCordova Museum, and San Jose Museum of Art, among others.

Mature work and critical reception Writers characterize Takenaga as an abstract painter despite the illusionistic and suggestive qualities of her art, noting that the work emerges from imagination, reflection and an intuitive process combining chance, order and repetitive labor, rather than from observation.

Barbara Takenaga, Gold + Red, acrylic on wood panel, , 2005. Collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. Takenaga's diverse influences include Tantric mandalas, the woodblock prints of Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Japanese-Pop graphic artist Tadanori Yokoo, Sol LeWitt, Roger Brown, and the Pattern and Decoration movement. Writers such as John Yau and Debra Bricker Balken ascribe her emphasis on decoration and detail, spatial ambiguity, and visceral, optical qualities to her interests in the ecstatic, pleasurable qualities of non-Western and Op art, each of which offered alternatives to Abstract Expressionism's self-expressive existential angst and Minimalism's flat, reductive self-referentiality. Formally, Takenaga engages opposing elements of surface and depth, flatness and dimension, stasis and movement. In conceptual terms, critics identify persistent (if submerged) themes in her work involving personal history, wonder and dread, mourning and mortality, along with a sense of levity that she has called "earnest goofiness." New York Times critic Ken Johnson described these paintings as "optically riveting and transcendentally suggestive [of] a swarming, spacey feeling like traveling at the speed of light through a galaxy or a psychic center of illumination."

The shifts first appeared in paintings that drew on Takenaga's midwestern upbringing.

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). 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. 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. During this time, she produced large-scale installations combining elements like rocks and cut and patterned paper that alluded to Zen raked gardens; their balance of asymmetrical elements, spatial ambiguity, black graphic markmaking, and subtle color explored the role of Japanese-American cultural identity in her art.

Recognition and public collections Takenaga has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2020), been elected an academician of the National Academy of Design (2013), and been recognized with awards from the For-Site Foundation, National Academy Museum, American Academy of Arts & Letters, New England Foundation for the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts; she has received residencies from the Space Program of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, Smith College printmaking workshop, and Dieu Donne Papermill. Ackland Art Museum, Arkansas Art Center, deCordova Museum, Henry Art Gallery, Museum of Outdoor Arts, Museum of Nebraska Art, New Jersey State Museum, Neuberger Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, San Jose Museum of Art, Sheldon Museum of Art, Tang Teaching Museum, and United States Embassy, as well as many college, university and corporate collections. She has exhibited at DC Moore Gallery (New York, since 2009), Gregory Lind Gallery (San Francisco, 2003–19) and Robischon Gallery (Denver), and her print publishers include Shark’s Ink (Colorado) and Wingate Studios (New Hampshire).