HENRY TAYLOR | B SIDE
Currently on View
Through January 28, 2024
Whitney American Art Museum
Installation view of Henry Taylor: B Side
For over three decades, the artist Henry Taylor, born in 1958 and based in Los Angeles, has depicted a diverse array of individuals, including family members, friends, neighbors, celebrities, politicians, and strangers. His artistic approach combines a raw immediacy with tenderness, showcased in the exhibition titled "Henry Taylor: B Side." The title draws a parallel to the lesser-known, experimental songs often found on the B side of a record album, reflecting Taylor's improvisational style.
Structured around thematic elements, the exhibition "Henry Taylor: B Side" showcases the artist's paintings alongside an assortment of his assemblage sculptures, infrequently displayed early drawings, a significant collection of painted objects on recycled cigarette packs and various everyday surfaces. Additionally, it features two new installations, with one created expressly for this particular exhibition.
Taylor's paintings, created swiftly and instinctively from memory, newspaper clippings, snapshots, and in-person sittings, exhibit a range of emotions—light-hearted, intimate, and somber. Employing flat planes of bold, sensuous color alongside rich, detailed areas and loose brushstrokes, Taylor breathes life into his canvases. Rooted in a profound empathy for people and their experiences, his art captures the humanity, social context, and mood of his subjects. The closely cropped, often life-size images intensify the visceral presence of the individuals portrayed.
Drawing from personal experiences and shared history, Taylor provides a glimpse into everyday life in the United States, particularly within his own community. His work addresses issues such as incarceration, poverty, and the disproportionately deadly interactions with the police that impact Black Americans. Deeply informed by art history, Taylor's oeuvre aligns with the expressive figurative painting and politically engaged works of European and American artists, forming a continuum with the likes of Max Beckmann, Bob Thompson, Philip Guston, and Alice Neel.
Description
The official catalog accompanying the major retrospective at MoCA LA: Henry Taylor creates a grand pageant of contemporary Black life in America
Surveying 30 years of Henry Taylor's work in painting, sculpture and installation, this comprehensive monograph celebrates a Los Angeles artist widely appreciated for his unique aesthetic, social vision and freewheeling experimentation. Taylor's portraits and allegorical tableaux--populated by friends, family members, strangers on the street, athletic stars and entertainers--display flashes of familiarity in their seemingly brash compositions, which nonetheless linger in the imagination with uncanny detail. In his paintings on cigarette packs, cereal boxes and other found supports, Taylor brings his primary medium into the realm of common culture. Similarly, the artist's installations often recode the forms and symbolisms of found materials (bleach bottles, push brooms) to play upon art historical tropes and modernism's appropriations of African or African American culture. Taken together, the various strands of Taylor's practice display a deep observation of Black life in America at the turn of the century, while also inviting a humanist fellowship that pushes outward from the particular.
