Barbara Takenga: Shibaraku
November 12 - December 23, 2020
Barbara Takenga: Shibaraku
DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present Barbara Takenaga: Shibaraku, featuring new paintings in the artist’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will run from November 12 – December 23. A catalogue accompanies the exhibition, with an interview by the artist Tom Burckhardt, with Barbara Takenaga.
Here, 2020. Acrylic on linen, 42 x 36 inches
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.
Downloads
Barbara Takenaga: Shibaraku. DC Moore Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2020. Softcover catalogue with interview by Tom Burckhardt, with Barbara Takenaga. 28 pages with color reproductions.
For more information and to purchase