Takako Yamaguchi

Takako Yamaguchi
Born	1952 Okayama, Japan
Education	University of California at Santa Barbara, M.F.A. (1978)
Known for	Painting

Takako Yamaguchi (born 1952, Okayama, Japan) is a visual artist based in Los Angeles, California.

Background

Born in Okayama, Japan, Takako Yamaguchi has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 1978. During the early years of her practice, Yamaguchi moved between Japan, the U.S. and France. Yamaguchi studied at the International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan (1971-1973) and received her B.A. from Bates College in 1975. She went on to get her MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1978.

Visual practice

Yamaguchi has been associated with the U.S.-based Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s. Her work embraces what has historically been disfavored by the formal reductivism of Euro-American abstraction and modernism. Decoration, fashion, beauty, sentimentality, empathy, and pleasure–forms and styles displaced by modernism and the contemporary artistic zeitgeist, are central aspects of Yamaguchi's painting practice. Through her proposed "poetics of dissent," Yamaguchi recuperates and mixes various visual traditions including Mexican Socialist Muralism, American Transcendentalism, Art Nouveau, and Japanese decorative arts. Her syncretic approach challenges the binary of an ostensibly race-neutral kind of International Modernism and the aesthetics of local, national and ethnic identity. Yamaguchi's "abstractions in reverse," a current that runs throughout the artist's practice, works backwards in the traditional historical framework of 20th century western art, from abstraction back towards illusionism. Her exploration of the semi-abstract, questions the artificial distinction between naturalism, abstraction, and craft.

Exhibitions

Yamaguchi has had solo exhibitions at Ortuzar Projects, New York (2023); Ramiken Crucible, New York (2021); Egan and Rosen, New York (2021); STARS Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); as-is.la, Los Angeles (2021) (2019) (2018); Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2008); Nevada Museum, Reno (2007); Kathryn Markel Fine Arts (2007); and Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles (2006). Her work has been exhibited in several museum surveys including The Ocean, Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2021); With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2019-2021); Transcendence: Abstraction & Symbolism in the American West, Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, Utah (2015); California Echoes: Women Inspired by Nature, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, California (2007); and L.A. Post-Cool, Museum of Art, San Jose, California (2002).

In Yamaguchi's most recent works at the Whitney Biennial 2024, her newest works comprise zigzags, tubes, and lines that is related to the weather and other inspirations from nature. She calls "abstraction in reverse", incorporating patterns such as clouds and waves but in a way that is expressed through an artist's vision and not with nature itself.

Collections

Yamaguchi's work is in the collections of the Nevada Museum, Reno; Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art; Long Beach Museum of Art, California; Eli Broad Family Foundation, Los Angeles; the Lynda and Stuart Resnick Collection, Los Angeles; and Deutsche Bank, New York, among others.