For Art Basel Paris 2024, Ortuzar is pleased to present a series of new paintings by Takako Yamaguchi. This presentation follows Yamaguchi's inclusion in the Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, and expands on her ongoing series of seascapes introduced in her 2023 solo exhibition at Ortuzar. In Yamaguchi’s new works, self-contained, seaside dreamscapes become spaces for the artist to play, her ambiguous motifs moving fluidly between representation and abstraction. Drawing equally on lineages as varied as Taishō era poster design, Art Nouveau screens and early American modernism, the artist’s uniquely syncretic approach destabilizes the conventions of Eastern and Western art histories, charting the global circulation of sensibilities and upending the hierarchies maintained between them through their collision.

In Yamaguchi’s new paintings, a uniform horizon divides each canvas in two, separating the oceanic from the atmospheric. Despite the precision of the works’ geometry, the continual movement of water––from waves to vapor, clouds to rain––and the shifting times of day subtly unravel the regularity of Yamaguchi’s series. The artist uses gradation evocative of ukiyo-e woodblock prints to imbue her richly saturated paintings with an illusionism that is in stark contrast to the reflective bands of bronze leaf that she applies. Natural elements like clouds, waves and mountainous islands repeat, zig-zagging, looping or braiding together. Moving between near-naturalism and something more akin to hard-edged painting, the motifs variably recede into the picture plane or layer on top of each other, framing the infinite horizon behind them.

Yamaguchi describes her paintings as “abstractions in reverse,” whereby the artist purposely moves against the current of twentieth-century Western art history, working backwards from pure abstraction toward illusionism. Arriving at a distinct visual language that resides in a space she calls “semi-abstraction,” Yamaguchi’s works cultivate a tension between naturalism and abstraction that has long been dismissed as decorative. With an awareness of precedents such as the Transcendental Painting Group—a constellation of artists active in 1930s New Mexico who arrived at a form of partial abstraction influenced more by Theosophy and its spiritual ideas than by the European avant-garde—as well as other early American modernists like Joseph Stella or Marsden Hartley, Yamaguchi questions the historical dismissal of works that approach abstraction through means other than a purely formalist logic. Through recuperating these ideals she places Modernism into productive dialogue with such disfavored, and often feminized, subjects as decoration, fashion and beauty, sentimentality, empathy and pleasure.  

Takako Yamaguchi received a BA from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine in 1975 and a MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1978. She was a 2024 Foundation for Contemporary Art Recipient and has held recent solo exhibitions at as-is.la, Los Angeles (2024 and 2022); Ramiken Crucible, New York (2021); Egan and Rosen, New York (2021); and STARS Gallery, Los Angeles (2021). Her work will be included in the forthcoming exhibition Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2024). Recent institutional exhibitions include: 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, 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). Her work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris; Nevada Museum, Reno; Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, Utah; Long Beach Museum of Art, California; among others.