Exhibitions
Takako Yamaguchi bursts onto the scene at MOCA with her Seascapes
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, presents MOCA Focus: Takako Yamaguchi , the Japanese-American artist’s first solo exhibition at a museum in the city. The exhibition, open from June 29, 2025, to January 4, 2026, includes ten recent paintings from her Seascapes series (2021–2025), characterized by precise lines, repetitive patterns, and metallic pigments that reinterpret nature in an abstract manner. At 72, Yamaguchi consolidates her career with an approach that blends contemplative slowness and formal sophistication, reaffirming her singular vision within contemporary art.
Takako Yamaguchi is a Japanese-American artist whose career has focused on reclaiming the decorative and sentimental against the rigidity of formal modernism. With a vast independent career, her work has gained significant traction in recent years, both at auctions and in museums.
Yamaguchi is associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s, distinguishing himself by incorporating elements such as ornamentation, fashion, beauty, empathy and emotion into his work, in open contrast to the hegemony of minimalism and formal abstraction of the time.
Her artistic output is informed by a visual syncretism that interweaves Japanese decorative art, Art Nouveau, Mexican socialist muralism, American transcendentalism, and European Romanticism. The artist herself has defined this creative strategy as a "poetics of dissent," understood as a gesture of recuperation and revaluation of that which modernism had relegated or dismissed.
Yamaguchi's paintings at MOCA in Los Angeles, precisely executed yet imbued with a subtle sensuality, combine a visual vocabulary that interweaves both Eastern and Western influences. Through abstract zigzags, spirals, and braids, he evokes natural motifs such as rain, waves, and mountains, creating a synthesis that crowns decades of exploration and provocation around style, taste, and identity. At 72, Yamaguchi confesses to enjoying this exhibition more than ever. His work is distinguished by a deliberate slowness and a character that opposes the accelerated pace of mass-market art, demonstrating a conscious resistance to convention.
