Barbara Takenaga

Barbara Takenaga is an American artist known for swirling, abstract paintings that have been described as psychedelic and cosmic, as well as scientific, due to their highly detailed, obsessive patterning. She gained wide recognition in the 2000s, as critics such as David Cohen and Kenneth Baker placed her among a leading edge of artists renewing abstraction with paintings that emphasized visual beauty and excess, meticulous technique, and optical effects. Her work suggests possibilities that range from imagined landscapes and aerial maps to astronomical and meteorological phenomena to microscopic views of cells, aquatic creatures or mineral cross-sections. In a 2018 review, The New Yorker described Takenaga as "an abstractionist with a mystic’s interest in how the ecstatic can emerge from the laborious."