Takao Tanabe’s Land series is a central component of the travelling retrospective Takao Tanabe: A Centennial, currently on view at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler, before travelling to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. Spanning more than seven decades of the artist’s practice, the exhibition situates the Land paintings as a pivotal moment in Tanabe’s career, when, in the early 1970s, he moved away from hard-edge abstraction toward a sustained engagement with the Canadian landscape.

In 1972, Tanabe accepted a position directing the art program at the Banff School of Fine Arts (now the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity). Travelling west from New York, he crossed the Prairies, whose expansive horizons and subtle contours prompted a new direction in his painting. Rather than depicting specific sites, Tanabe distilled the landscape into broad horizontal bands of land and sky, using restrained colour and subtle tonal shifts to establish space and distance. The absence of human presence and descriptive detail directs attention to the structure of the landscape itself.

Working primarily in acrylic, Tanabe developed a spare pictorial language in which subtle variations in colour and carefully balanced forms convey the scale and character of the prairie. The Land paintings brought the formal concerns of his earlier abstraction into a new relationship with the natural world. This approach would continue to inform his later paintings of coastal British Columbia, where the relationship between land, water, and sky became a defining feature of his work.