Gregory Lind Gallery is pleased to present a new series of works by New York-based painter Barbara Takenaga. This is the artist’s fifth solo show with the gallery. Takenaga’s drawings and paintings expand on the artist’s oeuvre of provocative cosmic topographies, which evoke the vital interplay between matter and energy, order and entropy. These are works that reference everything from the elegant trompe l’oeils of Op Art, to the internal logic of molecular structures, the lines of magnetic forces, and the idiosyncratic connections between science and the space of the imagination.

Takenaga has expanded on her lexicon of simple shapes – dots, lines, circles, and undulating wave patterns of varying scales – with the inclusion of a flat line that is both horizon and division. In this series, Takenaga includes her signature light-saturated, reflective surfaces and an opalescent palette of pulsing color schemes that often radiate out from a vanishing point in multifarious swirls, evoking landscapes and mirrored images.

In works such as “Blue Haze,” a kaleidoscopic terrain of undulating metallic dots is suggestive of celestial objects. “Minus Red” presents a feverish yet contained explosion of rays of color against a backdrop of a primal, amorphous fog, before melting into a vermillion event horizon of perceptual space. Takenaga’s repeated shapes are balanced by the exuberance of her compositions. While her work has been referred to as “psychedelic,” this is sensory profusion that never becomes visual overload. Her painstaking precision and references to larger processes in nature are, then, an apt visual metaphor for the cosmic energies that pervade our space in both obvious and undetected ways.

Barbara Takenaga lives and works in New York and Williamstown, MA. Her recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition in 2011 at DC Moore Gallery, New York. Her group exhibitions include Goldmine, Works from the Contemporary Collection of Michael and Sirje Gold at the University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach; Elements of Nature: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation at the Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard, CA; and Vortexhibition Polyphonica at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA. Takenaga has been featured in publications such as Art in America, Art News, and the New York Times. Her work is included in Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art since the 1960s, by David S. Rubin, published in 2010 by San Antonio Museum of Art and MIT Press.

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