Sunday

"Sunday" closes Takeda's 2011 weekday triptych, etched and aquatinted in the same flat grey register as its companions. The print treats the day's particular Japanese inflection — the slow afternoon, the muted dread that precedes Monday — through a single domestic vignette: a figure on a futon, a half-finished meal, a television left on. Aquatint provides the soft tonal washes that define her sequences, with rosin-resisted areas bitten in stages to differentiate wall, fabric, and shadow; etched line carries the architectural drawing. Takeda's apartments in this period are airless and over-furnished, the figures inside them quiet and slightly compressed by the surrounding objects. As the third panel in a named-day cycle, "Sunday" continues her long-running interest in the way contemporary weekly routine empties out a dwelling — a concern she shares with the post-Showa generation of Japanese printmakers working through interior space as a barometer of mood rather than as a setting for action.