Barbara Takenaga: Shibaraku

BA R BA R A TA K E N AG A

BARBARA TAKENAGA s hibaraku

D C M O O R E G A L L E R Y

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PEARLESCENT WHITE , 2020. Acrylic on linen, 70 x 60 inches

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wait a minute !.

T O M B U R C K H A R D T I N C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H B A R B A R A TA K E N A G A

TOM • To lead off with an obnoxious question— what do you

think is too often talked about in your work and what do you think is often avoided?

BA R BA R A • I actually like most of what is written about my

work. It is really helpful. For instance, people talk about the openness of reading, the cosmic aspect, and interest in natural phenomena, which I really love, so I’m completely thrilled that the work gets perceived that way. One aspect that doesn’t get discussed as much is that I feel that there is a little dark underbelly in the work, and I think about it a lot more than viewers seem to see it.

A little weird, sometimes funny edginess just fits into the way I think of the world. I’m trying to kind of stand in the middle in terms of what you see. It could be a head or it could be a pile of whatever, and if you allow for those possibilities, then you’re a little bit more open minded—I think of it more like visual tolerance. You’re not quite sure what to name it, it’s a little ambiguous, but you’re in between perceptions. It comes from the old idea of reconciliation of opposites, metaphors of the light and the dark, that kind of dichotomy.

T • I feel like there are also two sides in your process. There is a kind of polarity between two approaches, the first being the giving up of control in the beginning phase of painting, which is the liquid pour. What are those moments in your studio like? Is it something you have to get into a particular mindset for? Is it kind of performative in a sense?

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HERE , 2020. Acrylic on linen, 42 x 36 inches

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B • I think it is a little performative. The best part is that I usually do the pour at the end of the day and then come back in the morning, and I never know what it’s going to look like. I leave the studio when it’s very beautiful and liquid, emerald and shiny, and when I return, paint has moved and mixed, it’s become matte, the little white spots have travelled. It has its own life. And I think that is so great because the painting—just like we are—is at the mercy of physical forces: gravity, momentum, inertia. The paint wants to pool towards the center or leave a spiral trail. Very micro/macro.

Like atoms and galaxies, Mandelbrot fractals and fjords, the paint becomes a metaphor for something larger.

T • That giving up of control, is it mostly about how to make the painting or is it really metaphorical for a state of being for you?

B • It is both. That’s why I’m good at standing in the middle. [laughter] I think the process of trying to embrace change and unpredictability extends to both painting and a desired state of being. Surrendering to it, and then trying to rein it in with control — and because I think that in terms of the way we live, and myself in particular—those issues are hard. You can talk about the randomness of a pour, right?

It’s just paint and it’s settling and it’s moving and it’s doing what it wants, and then you can talk about how hard it is to accept mortality. You can go from just that little edge…. [ laughter ]

T • Soup to nuts.

B • Yeah! That’s to me the big and the little, the idea of the “long address,” how one defines oneself. You are cells who are in a body, who live on the planet earth, who live in the solar system and on and on. I was just thinking it’s so funny, the pouring of the paint and the ease and reluctance of it

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RED MERYL , 2020. Acrylic on linen, 54 x 45 inches

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AIRFOIL , 2020. Acrylic on linen, 54 x 45 inches

FIELD, 2020. Acrylic on linen, 45 x 54 inches

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moving, dragging and the randomness of it. It’s easy then to go okay, it’s the expansion of the universe.

T • The surface of the painting is in the middle of that long address—between the micro and the macrocosmic. We can see the painting itself with our eyes, but need technology, a microscope or telescope to see the other ends of the spectrum.

B • It really interests me that close up photos of hair look the same as pictures of trees, or that the spiral cowlick on a baby’s head is just like the galaxy spiral. That just makes sense to me. It underlies the fabric of the small to the large, and it’s an incredible and marvelous thing.

T • Your reassertion of control in the painting process is apparent in that second phase— more detail-oriented, creating the image by handwork. In that first phase you’re not touching the painting, you’re pouring paint, but there’s no actual connection between your body and the surface.

You’re hovering over it as it’s flat on a table and it’s a very particular kind of relationship and orientation. And then the second phase is about the detail, the touch from your body to your brush, the contact to the surface of the painting and recapitulating things into the image.

B • And then I would add labor into that. It’s really hard for me to leave a painting as it dried, uncontrolled. I feel I have to do a certain amount of structuring, and a certain amount of labor, literally. It must have something to do in my mind with value, or a Midwestern work ethic where you go out there and work hard, and you come home at the end of the day and you feel good, you did your job. And also being Asian— I guess lots of other people of color feel the same

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GREEN CENTER , 2020. Acrylic on linen, 60 x 70 inches

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way, that you’ve got to work hard, you’ve got to work hardDER, for whatever you can get. It’s one thing you can control.

When I was a kid I so wanted to be Everyman— or rather Everygirl—I wanted to be part of the crowd so no one noticed me. But at the same time it’s like, no, I’m going to work hard so I make sure you do notice me. [laughter] I want both.

T • That really locates some aspects of your process in your particular assimilation experience. Those two phases you work in have such different temporal qualities. The first is relatively fast and loose, while the second phase is where time is way slowed down, and it takes months and that’s where that work ethic gets built into it and you’re asserting your personality in a different way. You made the choice to have a lack of choice in the first phase and in the second phase, although it seems like you’re making a choice of total control, things still happen that are not in your control. Is that true?

B • It’s not so binary, it’s more like a Venn diagram. I’ve been really trying to embrace the fast. From 2000 to 2008, everything in my work was slow and deliberate and ritualistic, so I’ve been trying to figure out how to incorporate the fast more, and that goes back to that balance between things.

T • So, is a good painting where you get to paint out the bad bits?

B • That’s my process in a nutshell! I do the pour and then I paint out the parts I don’t like and I get to save the parts I do like. Change and no change.

T • I would also say that in the last several years you’ve cycled into a different relationship with color.

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20,000 MILES , 2020. Acrylic on linen, 45 x 54 inches

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SHIBARAKU , 2020. Acrylic on linen, 70 x 225 inches 14

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B • Oh! How so?

T • In the last several shows there’s generally less prismatic color in the paintings. Do you see a reason why that might have happened?

B • Well, as a former printmaker, I have a strong relationship with black and white. I had seen a Robert Kushner show, it had a lot of black and white paintings and it was so beautiful— elegant, and elegiac. I thought, oh, I want to do a show that basically relies on those opposites, to push the color down and submerge it, but when you get up close it has lots of little spots of color. Or you look at it straight on, it looks smoky gray and then you walk to the side and the white iridescent paint flares up and it’s this bright pink surprise. So the color is there, but muted or sly. It was a definite decision to make a show that was less colorful.

T • By submerging it you’re getting rid of the aggressiveness that color can have, so that you can then have the slow read of some of your images where a couple beats later you see something else or something unexpected.

B • I like that. I think I have been thinking about it the other way, which is that you get the main read, the fast read, from looking at the black shapes that determine the image. And then if you can take time for the slow read, other things will reveal themselves.

T • Let’s talk about the images that are emerging. It seems to me that in this new work there’s a looming quality to certain shapes that are often built out of black poured paint and they’re the dramatic inflection in the paintings with forms orbiting around them.

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ELIA , 2020. Acrylic on linen, 42 x 36 inches

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B • And sometimes they’re oddly figurative, which is an aspect I didn’t really want to have happen, but I’ve been drawn to that black shape, a silhouette, for a while now. I always think that it’s going to be elegant and this sort of tuxedo, a lovely kind of empty Zen space or something, and then it takes that turn.

T • That seems to me to be a shift, because it felt like ten years ago your work was very connected to landscape ideas, to growing up in Nebraska, with very strong horizontals that divided the spaces. They weren’t representations of landscapes, but they had a kind of adjacency to them, and that feels like it’s shifted, now it seems the locus of intention is getting more personified.

B • I often feel that in my work, I somehow went to outer space, then I landed in Nebraska, in the flatness of the Great Plains, and then I moved to New York City. I like what you said, that they still have that feel but they’re not as specific.

I really wanted them to move more into abstraction, into more ambiguous space so they could be aerial views, or microscopic views, or traditional horizontal landscape.

T • A move to the center again.

B • Yeah. With the five-panel painting, Shibaraku, initially I had wanted there to be two big strong black shapes, one larger, and one narrower, with a lot of open atmospheric nothingness in between them in a large scale, 18-foot-long expanse. So I did the black pours thinking they would be ominous abstract shapes. I wanted them to have this dark presence. And then of course I saw it was that strange two-headed figure. I had been looking at a lot of these Japanese prints, the ‘Large Head Actor’ prints, and I thought, “Oh my god, it’s that nose, it’s my uncle’s nose, it’s the nose on some of these actors.”

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PEACOCK , 2020. Acrylic on linen, 45 x 54 inches

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DECO THING , 2020. Acrylic on linen, 20 x 24 inches

CAT FEET, 2020. Acrylic on linen, 18 x 24 inches

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T • And that word? Shibaraku translates as?

B • Shibaraku is a Japanese word. And a Kabuki play, where there’s an evil warlord who is terrible to his people and threatening to kill royal prisoners. And at the climax, there’s a character offstage that yells out ‘Shibaraku!’ which translates to ‘wait a minute!’ or ‘hold on a moment!” And the hero comes out in this elaborate costume and is “shouting with his eyes” and wielding a giant sword — he defeats the evil character and asserts order out of chaos.

T • That’s you! You are Shibaraku! [ laughter ] The chaos is the initial phase of the situation, and then you come in and “Shibaraku” the hell out of it.

B • Shibaraku! [ still laughing ] I feel a little guilty for using the word because I know little about Japanese theater, and I don’t speak Japanese. And in some ways, it’s just this attraction, being drawn to these images and that particular narrative, but it doesn’t come from an informed, scholarly point of view. I don’t know a great deal about Asian art history but those are images I love.

You know, I’m not really Japanese, but I look Japanese, I’m hyphenated, right? I’m Asian-American, so what is my relationship to all of that? The older I get, the more I recognize that it actually is very relevant.

I wish I had a magic wand and could wave it around, shouting, Shibaraku! We are living in crazy times. I have to say that I feel very lucky and grateful that we are both artists and friends at this particular moment.

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OUTLINER , 2020. Acrylic on linen, 45 x 54 inches

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“The place where Takenaga transports us is mythic and made of paint , and its configurations are constructed from a careful repetition of abstract marks and forms, as if she is weaving something together.

The replication of marks becomes hallucinatory and even maddening… she lifts the viewer into a visual conundrum , an enigmatic realm .”

– J O H N YAU

BARBARA TAKENAGA’S PAINTINGS present an eloquent

a permanent installation of mosaic and laminated glass

inquiry into the emotional weight of natural phenom-

for the Metro-North Railroad White Plains Station. In the

ena and imagined spaces. Each carefully constructed

fall of 2017, Williams College Museum of Art organized a

composition questions the boundaries of the known by

twenty-year survey of Takenaga’s work, curated by Debra

offering visual translations of the ever-changing nature

Bricker Balken, accompanied by a book published by

of the physical world.

Prestel. Other solo presentations of her work include a traveling exhibition Waiting in the Sky at DC Moore Gallery,

Pairing fluid, atmospheric backgrounds with an ordered, labor-intensive formulation of crisp brushwork, Takenaga constructs abstracted shapes that can be understood as references to explosions, ecstasy, outer space, drifting land masses, and microbiology. Her use of pulsating color defines each discrete element in the woven, tessel-

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 NY (2017);

an exhibition 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.

lated paintings. The compositions undulate, radiate, and recede into seemingly vast space.

Takenaga is represented in the permanent collections of The Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, NC; Arkansas Art

Many of her painting titles present a duality of meaning like the images themselves, shape-shifting and fluctuating between the positive and negative, the infinitesimal and the infinite. The power of these paintings lies in their ambiguity, and is how Takenaga stakes out her own unique territory, nimbly making reference to familiar objects and personified forms through an iridescent, abstracted vocabulary.

In 2020, Barbara Takenaga was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of Fine Arts, and was

Center, Little Rock; The Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; The DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; Federal Reserve

Board, Washington, DC; Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Nebraska Art, Kearny, NE; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; The San Jose Art Museum, CA; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA, among others.

Barbara Takenaga lives and works in New York City.

commissioned by New York MTA Arts & Design to create

Clockwise from top left:

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IN BETWEEN; RIPPLE; GRAY / VIOLET; RECEIVER ( RED BROWN ) , 2020. Acrylic on wood panel, 12 x 10 inches

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SERRUL ATA 2 , 2020. Acrylic on linen, 36 x 42 inches

SERRUL ATA 3 , 2020. Acrylic on linen, 42 x 36 inches

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D C M O O R E

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535 West 22 Street New York New York 10011 212.247.2111 D C M O O R E G A L L E R Y.C O M

This catalogue was published on the occasion of the exhibition BARBAR A TAKENAGA: SHIBAR AKU DC Moore Gallery November 12 – December 23 , 2020

ISBN: 978- 0-9993167- 8 - 8

© DC Moore Gallery, 2020

Wait a Minute! © Tom Burckhardt, 2020 TOM BURCKHARDT is a painter and installation artist based in New York City.

In 2019 his most recent exhibit of paintings, Psychodiagnostik was shown at Gregory Lind Gallery in San Francisco. Burckhardt’s large installation Studio Flood was first exhibited in the 2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala, India and traveled to Pierogi Gallery, NY, 2017, and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art , 2018. An artist in residence at Yaddo, 2019, and resident Faculty at The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture 2007, he currently teaches at SUNY Purchase.

Design: Joseph Guglietti Photography: © Steven Bates Printing: Brilliant

Jacket: Pearlescent White, 2020 ( detail ). Acrylic on linen , 70 x 60 inches

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