Barbara Takenaga was born on 1949 and 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.
10 Facts About Barbara Takenaga
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Barbara Takenaga 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.
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Barbara Takenaga's 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.
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Barbara 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.
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Barbara Takenaga 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.
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Barbara Takenaga 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.
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Formally, Barbara Takenaga engages opposing elements of surface and depth, flatness and dimension, stasis and movement.
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In 2010, Barbara Takenaga made two significant shifts in her work: she began incorporating a flat, linear element serving as both horizon and spatial division, and she relinquished some control, allowing chance elements and looser patterns to emerge in bolder compositions.
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Barbara Takenaga earned a BFA and MFA from University of Colorado Boulder.
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Barbara Takenaga has exhibited at DC Moore Gallery, Gregory Lind Gallery and Robischon Gallery, and her print publishers include Shark's Ink and Wingate Studios.