FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Barbara Takenaga—Paintings
February 24 – March 27, 2010
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 4, 5 - 7:30 PM
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10:30-5:30 PM
Email: info@gregorylindgallery
Gregory Lind Gallery is pleased to present a series of new works by New York-based painter, Barbara Takenaga. Takenaga’s paintings, which include acrylic on linen and wood panel, evoke provocative connections to everything from ancient Tibetan mandalas to photographs of deep space, and represent a complex interplay of dualities that inhabit both the cosmos and human imagination. The exquisite tension between depth and surface, microcosm and macrocosm, and creation and destruction is rendered in multilayered visual narratives.
Her art utilizes a striking yet spare lexicon of dots, lines, circles, and undulating wave patterns of varying scale nested within each other. A repetitious sequence of bright, pulsing circles of color radiate hypnotically from a densely packed center of incandescent dots. The exhibition includes the 42” x 72” “Angel Diptych (Curled and Folded),” which provides a departure from Takenaga’s earlier darker palettes. In this piece—part of the Heaven series that Takenaga began several years ago—an icier, more metallic palette offers a light-filled, reflective surface that transforms in myriad ways, depending on lighting and the perspective of the spectator. This particular work, as well as “Whiteout III” (which also employs a more opalescent palette), delineates the tensions inherent in Takenaga’s art, in which two interlocking, associative systems inhabit the same area. The first system features a series of small dots that radiate outward to progressively larger dots, creating a sense of gradually deepening space. In the second system, a network of small grids starts at the corners of the canvas and slowly slinks toward the center in random dips and folds, rendering a shallow and surface-level effect, in contrast with the former system. Takenaga’s Halo paintings feature a luminous palette of cool blues and golds, with coronas around the perimeter of the radiating composition that implies the illusion of movement, similar to the rippling vortex of a storm.
Takenaga’s work references the trompe l’oeils of Op Art, the internal logic of fractals, and the mathematical quandaries of infinite regression. In a radiant and often psychedelic network of forms and colors, she expertly delineates the idiosyncratic relationship of abstract painting to science and nature.
Barbara Takenaga lives and works in New York and Williamstown, MA. Her recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition in 2009 at DC Moore Gallery, New York. Her group exhibitions include Vortexhibition Polyphonica, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; New Prints, Winter, International Print Center, New York; and the 183rd Annual Invitational Exhibition, National Academy Museum, New York. Takenaga has been featured in publications such as Art in America, Art News, and The New York Times. Her work will be included in a forthcoming publication, Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art since the 1960s, by David S. Rubin, San Antonio Museum of Art and MIT Press, 2010. This is her fourth solo show at Gregory Lind Gallery.