Barbara Takenaga “Shibaraku”

DC Moore Gallery

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DC Moore Gallery presents Barbara Takenaga: Shibaraku, featuring new paintings in the artist’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Shibaraku is a Japanese word that refers both to a type of Kabuki drama and also a word that loosely translates as “wait a moment!” In fact, each moment with Takenaga’s paintings will shape and re-shape the forms into something else, creating new beginnings with each glance. Starting with fluid pours of paint onto the canvas, Takenaga then creates undulating shapes with brushstrokes resembling dots, splashes, and sparks coming together and receding in outwardly infinite space. They can be understood as kaleidoscopic layers of outlines, horizons, and atmospheres, that coalesce as much as they diverge.

In the title work, Shibaraku, an expansive five-panel painting, Takenaga creates spans of white and gray atmospheric space in the middle panels. Closer observation reveals layer upon layer of muted flashes painted like small fireworks and cloud-like structures, flickering and disappearing depending on the movement of light around them. Dark, fluid, abstracted shapes coalesce like figures at each end of the sequence, underscoring the openness and depth of the middle panels, and imbuing the work with a boding yet alluring and mysterious aura.

Takenaga’s paintings continue to offer abstract visual translations alluding to the ever-changing nature of the physical world while challenging our understanding of those very spaces in a psychologically mesmerizing manner.

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 & Design to create a permanent installation of mosaic and laminated glass for the Metro-North Railroad White Plains Station. In the fall of 2017, Williams College Museum of Art organized a twenty-year 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, NY which traveled to Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, MI (2016); a large-scale public commission for SPACE | 42 at The Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, NY (2017); an exhibition at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE (2018); and a large-scale installation Nebraska (2015-2017) at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA.

The artist lives and works in New York City.