as galactic realms. The shifts first appeared in paintings that drew on Takenaga's midwestern upbringing. The largely gray and blue Nebraska Painting EL1 (2010) and Whiteout (2011) suggest limitless winter fields vanishing into big skies, while the more colorful Sparkler (Red Line) (2010) and Red Funnel (2013) allude to fireworks, carnival lights and tornadoes. She renewed her interest in ambitiously scaled, horizontal work in the panoramic triptychs Rise/Fall and Forte (2011), Diptych (Ikat) (2012), and later, Nebraska (2015, MASS MoCA), a 110-foot mural that repeated a dizzying, hand-painted wallpaper pattern reminiscent of a snowy, furrowed field under a distant blue sky. John Yau identifies a dissonance and instability he likens to dissimilar systems invading each other's territory in this work (e.g., Ronin, 2011). He attributes this to her looser approach and use of unearthly metallic paints (which change with the angle of the light), noting a collective, disquieting effect he interprets as acknowledgement of an indifferent universe. Art in America'''s Carol Diehl, however, discerns a sense of order beyond the easily comprehensible in the work's suspension between visual excess and rigor; she compares its mystical quality to van Gogh's The Starry Night. In her later work, Takenaga has admitted more open space and exposed the drips, puddles, and spatters of her modulated underpaintings as a compositional element (e.g., the lantern-like Green Light, 2013). She has also continued to expand her associative range to include northern lights, meteor showers (Night Painting (JFM), 2016), geodes and fractals, in work that Ken Johnson describes as viewed more "through the ecstatic, possibly pharmaceutically aided perceptions of a hippie dreamer" than "the technologically assisted eyes of a scientist."Johnson, Ken. "Barbara Takenaga, Waiting in the Sky," The New York Times, April 14, 2016. Retrieved September 24, 2020. Takenaga's paintings in the shows "Outset" (2018) and "Manifold" (2019) at DC Moore Gallery employ austere, contemplative palettes (black, iridescent white, silvery gray and blue) and bolder, shifting figure-ground relationships featuring large, dark shapes like holes in the images (e.g., Aeaea; Hello).Waltemath, Joan. "Barbara Takenaga and Patricio Guzmán: Telescopes and Other Visions," Brooklyn Rail, February 5, 2019. Retrieved September 24, 2020. Their mysterious forms draw widely—on classical Japanese art, scientific imagery and mid-century abstraction—and leave behind her fields, tarmacs and horizon lines for more confrontational, turbulent references to explosions, space travel, drifting land masses, and microbiology, evoking a world of constant pressure and relentless change. Works such as the