Takao Tanabe (Canadian, b. 1926)
Untitled, 1969
Acrylic on canvas
Gift of Jerome and Julie Rauch, G22380
The son of a commercial fisherman, Tanabe was interned in British Columbia with other Japanese-Canadians during World War II. After the war, he studied painting and calligraphy at several institutions in Canada and abroad. Tanabe’s style fluctuated within abstraction for decades but has recently taken a turn into landscapes inspired by the techniques of Caspar David Friedrich and Albert Bierstadt. Untitled represents his 1970s experimentation with geometric abstracts.