Barbara Takenaga (born 1949) 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." Takenaga has had solo exhibitions at the MASS MoCA Hunter Center, Huntington Museum of Art, Neuberger Museum of Art Space 42, and Art in General, and a twenty-year survey at Williams College Museum of Art in 2017. She has participated in group shows at the Frist Art Museum, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, deCordova Museum, and San Jose Museum of Art, among others. In 2020, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she has been recognized by the National Academy of Design and American Academy of Arts and Letters. Takenaga lives and works in New York City and is the Mary A. & William Wirt Warren Professor of Art, Emerita at Williams College. Mature work and critical reception Writers characterize Takenaga as an abstract painter despite the illusionistic and suggestive qualities of her art, noting that the work emerges from imagination, reflection and an intuitive process combining chance, order and repetitive labor, rather than from observation. She often begins with splashy, faux-Abstract Expressionist grounds, before methodically but intuitively applying hand-painted forms to create patterns; the process is informed by her early printmaking background and employs a flat, graphic approach that includes tracing, transferring, outlining, and pooling paint. Takenaga's diverse influences include Tantric mandalas, the woodblock prints of Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Japanese-Pop graphic artist Tadanori Yokoo, Sol LeWitt, Roger Brown, and the Pattern and Decoration movement. Writers such as John Yau and Debra Bricker Balken ascribe her emphasis on decoration and detail, spatial ambiguity, and visceral, optical qualities to her interests in the ecstatic, pleasurable qualities of non-Western and Op art, each of which offered alternatives to Abstract Expressionism's self-expressive existential angst and Minimalism's flat,