ARTISTS
MOCA Focus: Takako Yamaguchi
MOCA Focus: Takako Yamaguchi is the third exhibition in the recently relaunched MOCA Focus series, which presents an artist’s first solo museum show in Los Angeles and centers on new or discrete bodies of work. Born in Okayama, Japan, in 1952, Yamaguchi moved to the U.S. in the early 1970s and began to appropriate imagery from sources as diverse as Mexican muralism, Renaissance art, Japanese Nihonga, and Art Nouveau in ornate paintings that pose a challenge to rigid notions of ethnic identity and cultural ownership. At age seventy-two, the Los Angeles–based artist is synthesizing the motifs she has developed over the past forty years in a series of archly stylized oil-and-bronze-leaf seascapes featured in this exhibition. Yamaguchi’s precise yet luscious paintings incorporate her “Eastern” and “Western”-influenced vocabulary of abstract zigzags, spirals, and braids to denote natural forms like rain, waves, and mountains, representing a culmination of her decades-long provocations of style, taste, and identity.
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MOCA Focus: Takako Yamaguchi is the third exhibition in the recently relaunched MOCA Focus series, which presents an artist’s first solo museum show in Los Angeles and centers on new or discrete bodies of work. Born in Okayama, Japan, in 1952, Yamaguchi moved to the U.S. in the early 1970s and began to appropriate imagery from sources as diverse as Mexican muralism, Renaissance art, Japanese Nihonga, and Art Nouveau in ornate paintings that pose a challenge to rigid notions of ethnic identity and cultural ownership. At age seventy-two, the Los Angeles–based artist is synthesizing the motifs she has developed over the past forty years in a series of archly stylized oil-and-bronze-leaf seascapes featured in this exhibition. Yamaguchi’s precise yet luscious paintings incorporate her “Eastern” and “Western”-influenced vocabulary of abstract zigzags, spirals, and braids to denote natural forms like rain, waves, and mountains, representing a culmination of her decades-long provocations of style, taste, and identity.
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The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) is presenting MOCA Focus: Takako Yamaguchi from June 29, 2025 through January 4, 2026 at MOCA Grand Avenue.
The Los Angeles artist practices what she calls “abstraction in reverse,” starting from basic shapes to construct landscapes.
For the past half-century, artist Takako Yamaguchi has combined diverse motifs to form paintings that subtly critique art-historical precedents, from Ancient Greek architectural tropes.
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