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Shark's Ink
Barbara Takenaga: Lithographs
Barbara Takenaga: Lithographs
Barbara Takenaga
Barbara Takenaga is a painter who made her first lithograph at Shark’s in the summer of 2002. Her abstract works are full of repeated, obsessive mark making that energize the surface and imply a depth of space. In Night Visitor, based on a childhood dream, Takenaga draws a “kind of death/creation image- many elements coming together or breaking apart from the whole. The small elements can be seen as tiny spiraling Tibetan wheels of life, hairy rosettes. groovy references to 60’s psychedelia, or as described in the Village Voice, ‘centrifugal eyelashes'”. Shaker Blue is a swirling, cosmic composition that has implied deep space and motion.
Her work processes are exercises in measuring time, a kind of meditative practice, that to an observer seem madly playful and persuasive.
Her most recent print is "Small Springs (backsplash". “I like the sense of that in-between time of blue light in this print – between daylight and night in a stylized landscape of water and island. Iridescent, faintly pink geysers can be read alternately as small springs, white flames, flowering plants or the backsplash of something falling into ripples of water..
Image Credit:
Barbara Takenaga "Night Visitor" 2002 © Shark's Ink. 2021
Barbara Takenaga: "Shaker Blue" 2004 © Shark's Ink. 2021
Barbara Takenaga: "Angel (Little Egypt) State I" 2007 © Shark's Ink. 2021
Barbara Takenaga: "Wheel (Halo)" 2009 © Shark's Ink. 2021
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 and Design to create a permanent mosaic and laminated glass installation for the Metro-North Railroad White Plains Station. In the fall of 2017, Willians College Museum of Art organized a twenty-years survey of Takenaga's work, curated by Debra Bricker Balken, accompanied by a book published by Prestel. Other solo presentations of her work include a traveling exhibition "Waiting in the Sky" at DC Moore Gallery, New York which traveled to Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, MI (2016); a large-scale public commission for "SPACE/42" at the Neuberger Museum in NY (2017); an exhbition at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE (2018); and a large-scale installation "Nebraska" (2015-17) at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA.
Takenaga is represented in the permanent collections of The Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, NC; Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock; The Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; The DeCordova Musuem, Lincoln, MA; Federal Reserve Board, Washiibgton, DC; Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Nebraska Art, Kearney, NE; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; The San Jose Art Museum, CA; Smith College of Art, Northampton, MA; Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; Willams College Musuem of Art, Williamstown, MA; among others.
Barbara Takenaga lives and works in New York City.
