Takao Tanabe

Heffel Auction House Biography and Notes

In the 1950s, Takao Tanabe studied in New York with the Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. Throughout that decade and into the 1960s, he explored abstraction. In 1962, Tanabe was living in Vancouver, and it was a year of experimentation in which he moved in several directions, including his work in the Flag series. Roald Nasgaard wrote, “The Flag Paintings downplay gesture in favour of hand-drawn geometry and flattened colour planes. Their palettes are near-black, with offsetting bright yellow and white planes, and their compositions conflate foregrounds and window recessions and contradictory perspectival indications, as if feeding on distant memories of Matisse in the mid-1910s.” In Flags, Tanabe poses the central floating forms against the black background, giving them the illusion of dimensionality - particularly the top form with its white triangle seeming to fold in space, and its impression of a window created by the blue background, as dimensional as a sky. The hand-drawn lines provide an organic contrast to the geometry of the central forms. Flags is an outstanding work from this series, at once formally authoritative and inherently playful.