"Whatsis": Barbara Takenaga at DC Moore Gallery

Round Trip Time, 2024, acrylic on wood panel, 72 x 150 inches

Press Release | VIEW WORK

DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present Barbara Takenaga: Whatsis, an exhibition of new paintings on view through April 27. In recent years, Barbara Takenaga has explored the space between control and randomness, creating vast imagined spaces that evoke the interconnectedness of the natural world. Her new bodies of work continue this duality of fluidity and structure, while introducing graphic and geometric forms. Takenaga translates, recombines, and hybridizes these visual systems, reinterpreting them across cultures and generations.

Takenaga’s new paintings evoke at once the open expanses of the ocean, outer space, and the night sky, and the microscopic structures of cells. She begins her process with a liquid paint pour, allowing the physical forces of gravity and the properties of paint to create patterns as it rolls and settles. From these chance operations, she locates an internal structure to the composition, which she defines with labor-intensive brushwork.

In the major six-panel painting, Two for Bontecou (2022), imposed geometric edges interweave with the splashy, cosmic paint pour, creating a pulsing, shifting web. The painting is an ordered cacophony, a “big bang” explosion that mimics the entropic forces of nature.

For her new Translations series, Takenaga looked to Japanese ukiyo-e prints, interpreting forms and details from these images into her own visual language. Drawn to the spatial ambiguities inherent in the flat image of the print, these paintings reference familiar forms while placing our notion of those associations in question. The monumental five-panel work, Round Trip Time (2024), continues this process and maps out new terrain, hovering between organic and technological, futuristic and historical, surface and deep space.

This exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an essay by Jeremiah McCarthy, “Barbara Takenaga: One Thing to Another.”

Barbara Takenaga lives and works in New York City. In 2020, Barbara Takenaga was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of Fine Arts. In 2017, Williams College Museum of Art organized a twenty-year survey of Takenaga’s work, curated by Debra Bricker Balken, accompanied by a book published by Prestel. Other solo presentations of her work include an exhibition at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE (2018); a large-scale public commission for SPACE | 42 at The Neuberger Museum of Art in NY (2017); and a large-scale installation Nebraska (2015–17) at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA.

Takenaga is represented in many permanent collections, including: The Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, NC; The Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; The DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; Federal Reserve Board, Washington, DC; Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Nebraska Art, Kearny, NE; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; The San Jose Art Museum, CA; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.

For press inquiries, please contact Caroline Magavern at cmagavern@dcmooregallery.com. 

"Two Storied": Barbara Takenaga at Pamela Salisbury Gallery

The title of the show “Two Storied“ is a play on the physical space of the upstairs and downstairs galleries, as well as the body of work exhibited on each floor. The upper floor paintings employ Takenaga’s process of combining random flows of paint that are reined in by structure and repetition. Lines are often determined by the flow of paint and visual elements can be mirrored or transferred,. As a former printmaker, the systemic approach is important in her work, which is often made in series and is more graphic than painterly. The work resides somewhere in between abstraction and representation – and can be read in a range of possibilities: cosmic views, night landscapes, or cascading springs/fountains of water.

The small paintings on the lower floor are influenced by Takenaga’s love of Japanese woodblock prints. She has long admired the graphic invention of those images, and during the pandemic lockdown started this series of small homages. Details of the prints have been traced, transferred, mirrored, rotated, and mediated through random applications of paint, echoing her general process. These “transfer” images carry a familiarity and yet sit in that place between naming and formal color and shape.

TWO STORIED
BARBARA TAKENAGA
JUNE 24 - JULY 23, 2023

PAMELA SALISBURY GALLERY
362 1/2 WARREN ST
HUDSON, NY

CirrusM, 2023, acrylic on linen, 24 x 20 inches

Barbara Takenaga artwork revealed at Metro North White Plains Station

Barbara Takenaga’s “Forte (Quarropas)” and “Blue Rails (White Plains)” were officially unveiled on November 1st at Metro North’s White Plains Station. The mosaic and laminated glass artworks feature Barbara Takenaga’s signature swirling and detailed abstract compositions. The undulating movement references rail travel, the history of the city, and its exuberant energy.

The mosaic artwork “Forte (Quarropas),” the native name for White Plains, features a sweeping composition of dynamic sky with flowing blue water, evoking both a celestial majesty and referencing the role water has played throughout the history of White Plains. Located on the wall directly facing the main entrance of the station lobby, the deep sea of blue and splashes of iridescent green to pink and aqua sparkle and come alive following the footsteps of the commuters passing by the lobby wall.

Made of laminated glass, “Blue Rails (White Plains)," is located on the side platform overlooking the station’s parking lot and Hamilton Avenue, a main artery connecting the city’s downtown. The long horizontal image is composed of a series of mirrored abstract patterns in a forward and backward movement in space. Each composition is anchored by the radiating light from a misty horizon, suggesting the disappearing tracks as one moves away from the station. Animated by shifting light throughout the day, “Blue Rails (White Plains)” is a visual play to the “rhythm of the rails”.

Barbara Takenaga stated, “White Plains has a rich and diverse past, from its modern history tracing way back to the presence of Native Americans. The translation of the wonderful Weckquaeskeck name Quarropas, meaning ‘white marshes’ or ‘plains of white,’ still continues today in a very resonant way. I am interested in the poetry and imagined references to landscape — filtered through my working process, which is visually abstract and stylized, and at the same time pays homage to the City of water and white mists.”

“Forte (Quarropas)” mosaic artwork is fabricated by @instamosaika. “Blue Rails (White Plains)” laminated glass is fabricated by @mayerofmunich.

Further Reading
MTA Arts & Design Media Announcement

Photos: Steve Bates

Barbara Takenaga | Solo Presentation | ADAA The Art Show | DC Moore Gallery

DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present a solo presentation of new paintings by American artist Barbara Takenaga at ADAA’s The Art Show, November 4 -7, 2021.

Barbara Takenaga’s paintings offer abstract visual translations alluding to the ever-changing nature of the physical world while challenging our understanding of those very spaces in a psychologically mesmerizing manner. Takenaga arranges the simple components of her dense, abstract paintings into stunningly detailed compositions that undulate, radiate, and recede in seemingly infinite space. Her dazzling repetition of forms suggests the inherent yet sometimes incomprehensible logic of both the cosmic and the cellular, while spontaneous twists and puckers preserve the elements of wonder and surprise. Crisp, saturated color defines each discrete element in the tightly woven, tessellated work.

November 4 - 7
Benefit Preview: Wednesday, November 3
Online and at Park Avenue Armory, New York, NY

Interview with Barbara Takenaga for DC Moore Gallery

Please enjoy this glimpse inside my studio created for DC Moore Gallery!

I hope everyone is safe out there. My life seems suddenly full of disinfecting – my keys, door knobs, and phone have never been so clean.
As artists, many of us are finding the lockdown solitude oddly familiar, as we often spend so much time alone in the studio. I love my time there, painting and listening to audible books. I’m lucky to have my little dog, Andy, with me as I work -- as Edith Wharton wrote “…a heartbeat at my feet.”

Barbara Takenaga studio

I have a lot of work in progress, paintings are just started and others that have been “finished” for months/years but sit there, still needing a little as-yet-to-be-found something.

Close-up of wall in Barbara Takenaga studio.

That drawn out end time reflects my process – a lot of waiting for the image to tell me what to do. Learning to relinquish control when I’m a control freak. Learning to adapt and accept randomness when I hate change. I know, who knew? All of this is the underlying, invisible aspect of my work, trying to go with the (paint) flow in a mindset that adamantly wants things to stay still and structured. A very apt dilemma in these difficult days, when everything is in flux.

 So here are a few details of large paintings rather than the full image. It’s a preview but allows me to avoid putting half-baked work out there that may haunt me online. Letting go and holding on.

Top: Detail of Fan Out, 2020. Acrylic on linen, 45 x 54 inches. Bottom: Detail of Work in Progress, 2020. Acrylic on linen, 60 x 70 inches.

And a few small ones.

Little Green/Blue, 2020. Acrylic on wood panel, 6 x 6 inches.

Left: Gray/Violet, 2020. Acrylic on wood panel, 12 x 10 inches. Right: Swimmer, 2020. Acrylic on wood panel, 12 x 10 inches.

Also, details of the studio. My view of my shoes and my stash of used paint cups. The work table where I write down random notes that get abraded and fade away over time, like a loosening memory.

Left: Barbara Takenaga work table in studio. Right: Barbara Takenaga studio with used paint cups.

Visible there, a quote from the writer Hilary Mantel, “The evening, dove-like, is circling itself to rest.”

Barbara Takenaga studio