Barbara Takenaga: Whatsis

BARBARA TAKENAGA

BARBARA TA K EN A G A

ROUND TRIP TIME , 2024. Acrylic on wood panel, 72 x 150 inches

ONE THING TO ANOTHER

TOWARD THE END OF 202 0, Barbara Takenaga and I began talking about the possibility of her joining a group exhibition I was then co-organizing. Built around the idea of an inspired encounter, the exhibition would put contemporary artists in dialogue with women artists from the modern art galleries at Kykuit the historic house museum in Tarrytown showcasing Nelson Rockefeller’s significant collection of twentieth-century art. The exhibition aimed to illustrate the visual connections of intergenerational influence and innovation between the modern and contemporary periods. I’d long been an admirer of Takenag a’s work, and although I was familiar with her characteristic carefully constructed fields of swirling dots and undulating marks, I knew little of her earlier artistic forays. Dur ing our first studio visit, I learned that Takenaga began her career as a printmaker at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her first major body of work , Here to Here: Sense and Nonsense , occupied an entire, sprawling gallery: the 1978 thesis show involved a seven- by fifty-two-foot immersive grid of lithographs, shapes both biomorphic and crisp, rotated and repeated in various configurations. Interestingly, and relevant for where she would go with her work for the exhibition, some of the prints extended off the wall, paper spreading onto the floor and into the space of the viewer.

ALONGSIDE , 2024 . Acrylic on linen, 60 x 140 inches

Takenaga also told me of a time, in the early 1990s, when she turned to hollow-core doors for her painting support, conceptually attracted to their liminal presence and transforming them into larger-than-life portals. During this time, Takenaga was a resident at the Marie Walsh Sharp Art Foundation in TriBeCa. Leaning against the wall, these works expanded the artist’s previous printmaking installations into painted architectural elements. A photo from this time used in preparation for a documentary of the project shows one of the ambitious works, Heads and Torsos ( 1992 – 93 ) , which spanned twenty-six feet in length. In a decade that would see the efflorescence of identity politics in art, these abstract works were rarely shown. I found, and still find, them to be transfixing. The panels conjure everything from the objecthood of Japanese screens to the visual forms of MRIs and Rorschach inkblots.

Takenaga would ultimately create Two for Bontecou (2022) [ pp 24 –25] for the Kykuit exhibition, harking back to a work in Rockefeller’s collection. “I’ve always admired Lee Bontecou’s structures, so that was an easy choice,” Takenaga said. “I was drawn to their compositions, having worked a decade with radial dot paintings in ‘big bang’explosions and spirals.” Bontecou’s Untitled , of 1960, is a magisterial piece, an early example of the artist’s wall-mounted reliefs. Across and behind a welded steel armature, Bontecou stretched and

Installation view of thesis exhibition Here to Here: Sense and Nonsense , 1978 Lithographs and mixed media, 7 x 52 feet. Collection of the artist

BLUE POUR ( MARCELLUS ), 2024. Acrylic on linen, 70 x 60 inches

CIRRU S , 202 3

Acrylic on linen, 20 x 24 inches

HI-LO ( RTT ), 202 3. Acrylic on linen, 42 x 36 inches

fastened various materials, from sumptuous black velvet to discarded canvas originally used as conveyor belts in the laundry below her East Village apartment. She also “painted” them with the carbon spray soot from the flame on her acetylene torch. All untitled, these powerful constructions approximate both machinelike and organic forms, defying any easy art historical classification and straightforward interpretation. Takenag a’s work simultaneously distills and expands Bontecou’s visuals into new horizons. Two circular forms, one outlined in black, the other in international orange, splay across six hollow-core wood doors. Mirror images, they call to mind the tunnel between two black holes or the eyes of an unearthly face. Though radially symmetric, the painterly treatment of the work’s two halves are worlds apart. The right is a visionary euphoria of white paint sparks trailing and tumbling across space, the left a field o f luminous aggregates that appear to radiate and hum with life. Lee Bontecou used the term worldscapes to describe her work; Takenaga uses the term headscapes. “When all put together,” she explained to me, “the painting is an ordered cacophony. Exploding, broody, lovely, roiling, cosmic, earthy, funny, scar y it’s expansive but reined in with the Bontecou structure.”

Two years after Two for Bontecou , Takenaga made Double Vision (2023), which also takes a 1960s Bontecou and repeats its shaped arcs around a central hole. When Bontecou first came to critics’ attention, many latched onto the dark circular projections in her work over anything else, projecting negative associations onto them.

Heads and Torsos , 1992. Acrylic on wood doors, 8 4 x 216 inches. Collection of the artist

RED TURNOU T, 2024. Acrylic on linen, 70 x 60 inches

Often their black vacant centers were read as vaginal, and a whole host of negative adjectives (menacing, terrifying, etc.) is peppered throughout the early, misogynistic criticism. Takenag a’s gesture with this painting seems almost reparative. While cobalt blue tops everything beneath i t an order imposed from above a red arched overlay gives form to various colors. In this register, Bontecou’s form is translated into the palette of the Sakura , where the blossoms, the leaves, the sun, and the sky all encircle the center mass.

At this point, it might be helpful to unpack Takenag a’s technique a bit. She outlines some of her working method in a 2013 conversation with artist Robert Kushner:

“First, I make the backgrounds splashy, faux Abstract Expressionist grounds with freely manipulated paint, applied without much preconception. After that, I play ‘Zen Surrealist,’ studying the accidental incidents and finding subject matter embedded in the painting So the formal and the evocative are intertwined.”

Often this process happens over days and the mornings bring surprises as pigments have pooled and gathered according to the logic of their own agency. In all of this is an emphasis on structure, whether repetitive or varied, rational or emotional. Beneath the surface, Takenag a’s paintings suggest, lies an order to the great chaos, whether in the configuration of the stars or the interior of a geode. And while randomness, chance, and happenstance seem to hold sway, art offers the possibility of connection that forestalls a crippling nihilism. Takenaga has mentioned that this sense of urgent connectedness influenced her following the passing of her parents alongside a growing consciousness of mortality. One is reminded of Rhoda’s great insight into art and life in the wake of Percival’s death in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves : “The structure is now visible; what is inchoate is here stated; . . .”

While working, Takenaga is constantly negotiating between the part and the whole, especially as she has increased her scale over the years. This constant oscillation between the micro and macro and back again is also echoed in viewers of the work. (Erwin Panofsky, that great art historian, once said Jan van Eyck’s eye operated as

HUMME R , 2024. Acrylic on linen, 70 x 45 inches

TRANSLATIONS ( FOR KIYOMITSU ), 2024 Acrylic on wood panel, 10 x 8 inches

TRANSLATIONS ( FOR SHUNTEI ), 202 3 Acrylic on wood panel, 10 x 12 inches

TRANSLATIONS ( FOR KIYONOB U I ), 2022 Acrylic on wood panel , 12 x 10 inches

TRANSLATIONS ( FOR KIYONOBU II ), 202 3 Acrylic on wood panel, 12 x 10 inches

both a microscope and a telescope, which is why beholders move constantly between many close and far positions. ) Takenaga also often employs interference paint, which derives its effect from mica platelets to create a flickering surface activated by the viewer’s position in relation to the work. While her earlier series left no trace of the responsiveness of paint, Takenaga has pushed this process over the course of the last two decades, and especially in recent works like Blue Pour (Marcellus) ( 2024 ) [ p p 8/9] and Alongside ( 2024 ) [ p p 6/7], resulting in majestic expanses that evoke everything from outer space and scientific illustrations to oceanic life and spermatozoa.

Eventually, the Bontecou works led to Takenag a’s Translations series. “These paintings also use an ‘outside’ structure,” she elaborated. “Before this I had always found the structure in the painting the pour determined the image and the painting and I were collaborators. In some ways, this involved relinquishing control.” The series draws visual inspiration from some of the greatest printmakers of ukiyo-e across the Edo and Meiji periods. Here, the vocabulary of forms from samurai, courtesans, and kabuki actors is translated into the language of twenty-first-century painting. Multivalent structures abut spatial ambiguities, summoning equally swords and clothing. This mining of Japanese subject matter also recalls a work from the hollow-core doors series, The Long Resonance (1991). In this work, amidst various existential and allusive symbols, sits the image of a Japanese dignitary taken from a thirteenth century scroll painting housed in the collection of the National Museum of Kyoto. In many ways, the painting forms a neat bookend with Round Trip Time (2024) [ pp 2/3], the opus of the Translations series. Where previ ously the artist’s sourcing was direct, now, woodblock forms have given way to an evocative maelstrom of heroism and myth. (That the painting is on wooden panels only furthers its association with the printer’s key-block. ) Resonances, indeed.

What are we to make of this return? I believe the larger answer is in Takenaga’s emphasis on resonance and repetition, whether in the form of the dots and sparks themselves or the sources of art history.

HUNKY DORY ( AT ), 2024. Acrylic on linen, 54 x 45 inches

There is longing in these works, longing for a structure singular but built from many the longing at the heart of American art. Repetition creates culture. Acts, both of speech and of the body, when repeated and reiterated and performed and reified and memo rialized, create culture, and often are viewed only in retrospect as such. Takenag a’s is not repetition for its own sake or for ironic postmodern critique. In her vein of repetition, there is a ges ture approximating a spirituality, a skimming of the surface of something beyond the visible. An art that sensitizes viewers to life outside the walls of the gallery or the rooms of the museum, one that fosters a greater sense of connection: this is Takenag a’s signal to us. We just have to look, and then look again.

JEREMIAH WILLIAM M C CARTHY I Pittsburgh , 2024

J eremiah W illiam McC arth y is Chief Curator at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art. He is the curator or co-curator of the exhibitions Inspired Encounters: Women Artists and the Legacies of Modern Art (2022–23); Knowing and Naming: Abstraction Beyond Reality (2022); For America: Paintings from the National Academy of Design (traveled 2019 –22); and Women Artists in Pari s, 1850 –1900 (traveled 2017–18) He is currently organizing the first mid-career survey of Anila Quayyum Agha, which will tour nationally in 2024–25

COLOR RISING ( REVISED ) , 2023. Acrylic on linen, 24 x 36 inches

Acrylic on wood doors,

BARBARA TAKENAGA

IN RECENT YEAR S , Barbara Takenaga has embraced an open-ended process that combines meticulous structure with randomness, resulting in carefully constructed compositions that evoke the entropic nature of the physical world. Pairing fluid, atmospheric backgrounds with ordered, labor-intensive brushwork, Takenaga creates webs, fields, maps, explosions, and geodes, each outlined and traced in vivid shimmery hues of acrylic.

These compositions evoke massive expanses of celestial bodies and the natural world as well as microbiology, shape-shifting and fluctuating between the positive and negative, the infinitesimal and the infinite. Within these organic forms, Takenaga has also incorporated imagery from Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, taking details from these prints and translating them into her own visual language. This ambiguity is where Takenaga stakes out her own unique territory, nimbly making reference to familiar objects and personified forms while simultaneously placing our sense of those things in question.

In 2020 , Barbara Takenaga was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of Fine Arts and was commissioned by New York MTA Arts & Design to create a permanent installation of mosaic and laminated glass for the Metro-North Railroad White Plains Station. She also completed a 30 -foot wall mosaic for the sunken garden at NYU Langone as part of their permanent art collection. In the fall of 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 Delmonico and 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 Purchase 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; Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock; The Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento , CA; The DeCordova Museum, Lincoln , MA; Federal Reserve Board, Washington , DC; Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation , Los Angeles , CA; Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle , WA; Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, MI; Museum of Nebraska Art, Kearny , NE; National Academy Museum, New York , NY; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York , NY; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton , NJ; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia , PA; The San Jose Art Museum , CA; Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska, Lincoln , NE; 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.

Barbara Takenaga lives and works in New York City.

TWIN 1 ( LB ) , 2022 . Acrylic on linen, 24 x 30 inches

D C MOOR E GALLE R Y

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

B arbara Takenag a : W h at sis

DC Moore Gallery, March 21 – April 27, 2024

© DC Moore Gallery, 2024

One Thing to Another © Jeremiah William McCarthy, 2024

isbn : 978 -1-736772 3-4-8

desig n: Josep h Guglietti

printin g: Brilliant Exton, PA

photograph y: © Steven Bates

cover: ROUND TRIP TIM E, 202 4 (detail )

Acrylic on wood panel, 72 x 150

DC MOORE GALLERY