FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Barbara Takenaga - Paintings
March 1 - April 1, 2006
Reception: Thursday, 2 March 2006, 5:30-7:30 PM
Gallery hours: Tuesday–Saturday 10:30-5:30 PM
Email: info@gregorylindgallery.com

Barbara Takenaga’s expansive visual palette is full of dense abstractions. Peppered with discrete elements which radiant and spiral outward from a central vanishing point, and dots, lines, and orbs that dance across the surface of her paintings like variables in an elegant calculus, Takenaga’s pieces radiate with an aura of whimsy and the unknown.

Takenaga’s ornate decorative motifs evoke both cross-cultural and scientific imagery. Dazzling, circus-like colors ignite, expand, and contract against muted backdrops—rendering a hallucinogenic power similar to the psychedelic optical art of the 60s. Her perfectly calculated shapes also approximate the uniformity of fractals and microscopic organisms.

The explosive epicenters of Takenaga’s pieces are set against dark curtains of infinite space, and set the stage for a number of polarities: known and unknown, order and entropy, flat decorative detail and spiraling depth. As the particles are drawn toward the epicenter, we are reminded of the burst of illumination that must have occurred when the universe came into existence. Takenaga’s deftly conveyed sense of cosmic grandeur is especially potent in her Night paintings, which depict the wonder and awe that result from scrutiny of the nighttime sky.

The assembled works are like transient cosmic debris frozen in time, as if to denote the terrain of dream, in which the moments between collapse and creation are decisively memorialized. The artist’s saturated dreamscapes harbor both the familiar and unfamiliar aspects of infinite space in geometric menageries of atoms, pearls, fireballs, Tibetan wheels, and other luminous ephemera. Takenaga has also described her work as an exercise in time-measuring, so her vibrant squiggles and orbs can be viewed as the product of meticulous mark-making, depicting small moments and places in the impenetrable continuum of space and time.

Barbara Takenaga’s recent solo shows include Gregory Lind Gallery; McKenzie Fine Art, New York; Colorado University Museum, Boulder, Colorado; and McKinney Avenue Contemporary in Dallas, Texas. Selected group shows from the past year include the National Academy of Design, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs, The Painting Center, and Pavel Zoubok Gallery, all in New York City; DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts; and the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York. Takenaga has been reviewed in a number of publications, including Art in America, ARTnews, and The New York Times. Takenaga is a graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder. She lives and works in New York and currently teaches at Williams College in Massachusetts.

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