Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City | October 9, 2026 – April 11, 2027
Between Ornamentation, Perception, and Representation
Installation view, Barbara Takenaga: Awestruck, October 9, 2026-April 11, 2027, Charlotte Crosby Kemper Gallery, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Photo: Mark McDonald, 2026.
The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art presents Barbara Takenaga: Awestruck, an exhibition bringing together more than 45 paintings spanning 25 years of the artist’s practice. The survey offers an opportunity to examine how Takenaga challenges the boundaries between ornamentation, abstraction, and representation, questioning established distinctions between decorative structures, pictorial space, and visual meaning.
Through intricate patterns, repetition, and shifting scales, Takenaga constructs compositions that move between microscopic formations, imagined landscapes, and cosmic phenomena. Her paintings resist fixed categories: what initially appears as ornament can suggest a landscape, a cellular structure, or an expanding universe. In this movement between abstraction and recognition, perception becomes an active process through which images acquire meaning.
Barbara Takenaga, Red Turnout (2024), acrylic on linen, 70 x 60 inches. Kathryn and Marc LeBaron Private Collection, Lincoln, NE. Image courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York, © Barbara Takenaga. Photo credit: Steven Bates
Drawing on visual traditions that include Japanese prints and the work of Lee Bontecou, Takenaga’s practice also opens questions about the historical distinctions between ornament and abstraction, and the ways these categories have shaped the interpretation of painting.
Organized around process, scale, illusion, and art historical references, Awestruck traces the development of a pictorial language in which chance and deliberate construction coexist. As Takenaga explains in the museum’s press release, her work seeks to reconcile random elements with structure and order.
Curated by Jessica May and Tae Edell, the exhibition invites a reconsideration of the boundaries through which abstract painting has been historically defined, while foregrounding the relationship between visual experience, interpretation, and the construction of meaning.
Barbara Takenaga: Awestruck
October 9, 2026 – April 11, 2027
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
4420 Warwick Boulevard, Kansas City, Missouri
Curators: Jessica May and Tae Edell
More information: https://www.kemperart.org
