BARBARA TAKENAGA | Time Warp

“When Robischon Gallery‘s co-director, Jennifer Doran, approached me with the idea of a ‘look back’ at the last ten momentous years, I was intrigued and enthusiastic. Doran has a great eye and is so creative in brainstorming new ways to look at the work. This ten-year (2014-2024) ‘Time Warp’ of paintings covers a period when I was trying to redirect the imagery. From 2001 to 2010, I had been making very structured, radial dot paintings, obsessive and maximalist. But I felt I had exhausted this particular series and wanted to make some major revisions, employing more randomness/chance and loosening up the process. The revelation of the new work came slowly, as I wanted the work to respond to the organic qualities of the paint pours and visually stand in between naming a thing and not naming it. So, the imagery in the show moves from references to natural phenomena (tornadoes, tsunami, meteor showers) to using abstracted structures from Japanese Ukiyo-e prints.

But there's no dictating specifically what one should be seeing. There's room to play and maneuver--and the same goes for me. You can go right or left. It's like tennis. You don't know where the ball will be served to you. It opens a range of ways to see things. It's kind of visual tolerance. Okay. It's a waterfall on this painting. Or jewels hanging on a string. It's a bear. It's a mountain. Can it be all of those things at the same time? This is the opposite of me saying, it's a bear, an angry bear, and it's brown.

There is 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.”

• Barbara Takenaga

Barbara Takenaga’s fourth Robischon Gallery solo exhibition, “Time Warp,” offers a glimpse into the evolution and compositional changes by the celebrated artist’s approach toward painting in the last decade. Equally involved with concept and process, the artist’s intentional shift becomes evident when looking first at the earliest exhibited painting, Lines of Force (Red), in which the arcs of radiating dots join to create a horizon line suggestive of a distant sunset with a kaleidoscopic, syncopated rhythm. Floater (revised) and Red Thing repeat the intensity of palette and Takenaga’s often more typical exacting organizational structures. Never one to hold back on exploring complex subject matter or involved applications of paint, Takenaga nonetheless leans into a different mode mid-decade with the painting entitled Above Center. With its galactic center and graphic sunburst, it appears evocative of a beckoning portal opening new potentialities whether cosmic, organic or cellular.

                Takenaga further relocates her attention with her intimate “Translations” series paintings which refer to Japanese Torii artists of the Ukiyo-e style. The style often called the “floating world” genre with its flat planes and asymmetric compositional arrangements was used to create Kabuki theater posters, signage and scenery, among other painted or printed art. The work of the Torii artists offered a novel and ground-breaking way of seeing that the Impressionist movement embraced changing Western art in profound ways. For Takenaga, her “translation” series explores Ukiyo-e flat planes with a more graphic style of interlocking forms intermixed with her own charged palette and enduring explosive compositions. Each intimate painting is titled Translations followed by the name of a Japanese artist, such as Translations (for Kiyonobu II), a small painting with its central geyser form of almost anime-like elements with curling cosmic waves over a bright orange and coral background. In contrast, Translations (for Kiyomsu), is a mosaic of finely rendered black and white geometric and pooled paint centered over a delicate, pale pink ground. Quietly seductive, the small painting offers a brief contemplative pause in the exhibition but is no less striking than its more exuberant counterparts. Two of the most recent paintings, the brightly hued Forage and Red with Blue Violet, give a comparatively graphic impression with high color and planar configurations linked almost solely by a continuous, thin outline of pigment. 

Barbara Takenaga’s paintings over time reaffirm her dedication to the joy of discovery; a state where her audacious and hard-won marks continue to mesmerize and fully coalesce on the threshold of wonder.

Barbara Takenaga received both her BFA and MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Takenaga’s most recent awards include the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the FOR-SITE Foundation’s Wauson Fellowship, and the Eric Isenburger Annual Art Award from the National Academy Museum. She is represented in the permanent collections of The Library of Congress in Washington, DC; The Auckland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, NC; Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock; CU Art Museum, University of Colorado, Boulder; The Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; the Fine Art Program at the Federal Reserve Board, Washington, DC, The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; The San Jose Art Museum, CA; the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE; Museum of Nebraska Art, Kearney, NE; Federal Reserve Board, Washington, DC; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; The deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; and Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA, among others. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE; MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Brattleboro Art Museum, VT; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO; National Academy Museum, New York, NY; Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Asian Arts Initiative, Philadelphia, PA; the Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, WV; American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; and the International Print Center, New York, among others. Takenaga’s most recent professional engagements include an extensive solo exhibition at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center in Brattleboro, VT, as well as the first in-depth survey of the artist’s work mounted by the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, MA, and a large-scale commissioned public project in the Neuberger Museum of Art SPACE / 42, New York, NY.