Two for Bontecou

Label

When all put together, the painting is an ordered cacophony. Exploding, broody, lovely, roiling, cosmic, earthy, funny, scary—it’s expansive but reined in with the Bontecou structure. -- Barbara Takenaga

Takenaga’s abstractions grow out of the tension between her painted underlayers, where she pours and drips the paint—that is, where she relinquishes strict control of the “drawing”—and her meticulously detailed surfaces. She has long evoked unknowns in her work, suggesting ideas of infinite cosmos and microscopic universes simultaneously through her combination of the ethereal and the particular. For this painting, Takenaga paid homage to the American artist Lee Bontecou by referencing one of her relief sculptures (image below). Takenaga has added the essential framework of an important Bontecou sculpture to this painting, both mining that work’s essence and uniting that artist’s mysterious art with her own.

From the 2025 exhibition Always Already: Abstraction in the United States, curated by John Stomberg, Virginia Rice Kelsey 1961 Director; Jami Powell, Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Indigenous Art; and Amelia Kahl, Barbara C. and Harvey P. Hood 1918 Senior Curator of Academic Programing

Course History

Art History 40.02, The American Century, Mary Coffey, Spring 2025

Exhibition History

Always Already: Abstraction in the United States, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, April 26,2025.

Published References

London, Katrina and McCarthy, Jeremiah William. Inspired Encounters: Women Artists and the Legacies of Modern Art, New York: Dancing Foxes Press, 2023, pp. 150- 151, illus. Barbara Takenaga: Whatsis, Essay by Jeremiah William McCarthy, Exh. cat., New York, NY, DC Moore Gallery, 2024, p.24-25 Yau, John. “The Quiet Urgency of Barbara Takenaga’s Paintings,” Hyperallergic, online, April 22, 2024, illus.

Provenance

The artist, 2022; to DC Moore Gallery, New York, date unknown; sold to present collection, 2025.

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