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“I think a lot of times artists, we’re just working from one piece to another and it’s very myopic, and it seems like it’s moving forward, or ‘oh my god, I just discovered some incredibly new thing.’ And then you look back and it’s, ‘actually, I did something like that 20 years ago.’ And it feels good – it’s a nice thing. It says something about an individual – I don’t want to say ‘vision’ – but an individual path that one might have.” — Barbara Takenaga

Congratulations to Barbara Takenaga, one of the recently announced 2020 Guggenheim Fellows! In 2017-2018 the wildly inventive abstract painter was the subject of a retrospective at the Williams College Museum of Art and later that year featured in a solo exhibition, Outset, at DC Moore Gallery in New York. To accompany the exhibition, DC Moore hosted a conversation with Helaine Posner, Chief Curator Neuberger Museum of Art. In this video of the conversation, Takenaga speaks about her painting process and what she learned from the retrospective.

From DC Moore:

Takenaga pushes into further realms of meaning in this new body of work, incorporating motifs drawn from earlier paintings with new forms and fluctuations of space. Through a labor-intensive process that begins with the nonspecific pouring of paint onto canvas, Takenaga allows for unexpected happenings and accidents. From these earliest pours, she then coaxes her lyrical and complex vocabulary of marks, methodical patterns blending with the residue of chance. The forms she renders are completely abstracted yet suggest influences as diverse as the natural world, traditional Asian arts, and extraterrestrial phenomena.

Video by Bower Blue