When the economy is good and the art is appealing, the gallery business can be fairly lucrative. Sure, it has ups and downs like any commercial enterprise, but with high prices and 50 percent commissions, a savvy gallerist can reap dependable rewards over time.
Barbara Takenaga is the star of this lineup. She’s a 1978 University of Colorado Boulder grad who went on to New York and became one of the most respected painters of her generation, winning a coveted Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020. Takenaga’s work is inventive, technically dazzling and, when you spend a few minutes with it, walk around it, get up close to it and then far away again, exhilarating.
Of course, that’s just one way of looking at the paintings. They could also be stars exploding or volcanoes spewing or perhaps a psychic imagining of what it might be like to visually experience any of those things. This is abstraction in its freest form, and yet the paintings are also contained and relatable on a human scale. Like the best abstractionists, Takenaga is able to paint what it feels like to see.
There are other kinds of paintings in this set, works like “Black Line, Red,” that appear to be inspired by more tactile subject matter, such as fabrics or textiles, but they are connected in the way that the artist paints them by highlighting their smallest details and rhythms and building that into an image, where the positive and negative aspects of the scene alternate. Foreground and background are interchangeable, sometimes giving the works a 3-D effect.