Henry Taylor
Untitled
Untitled
$450,000
Untitled
2022
Acrylic on canvas
213.7 x 152.4 x 7.9 cm / 84 1/8 x 60 x 3 1/8 in
Los Angeles-based painter Henry Taylor is voracious and eclectic in his sourcing of subjects. From revered cultural icons to strangers scouted on the street, Taylor’s individual renderings are the thread with which the artist weaves a cultural narrative of contemporary American life and those who live it.
This ‘hunting and gathering,’ as he defines it, is above all an active process—one in which Taylor often mines his own history and experiences. In the artist’s studio, newspaper clippings and historical photographs of prominent civil rights figures and iconic athletes sit alongside Taylor’s snapshots of people both strange and familiar to him.
‘When you start to think about people, you start to think about the truth.’—Henry Taylor [1]
In ‘Untitled’ (2022), Taylor captures his friend and artist Sissòn. Taylor depicts Sissòn seated, facing the audience straight-on with a small golden dog nestled in their lap. Flat sections of bold saturated color are offset by areas of rich and intricate detail: while Sissòn’s body floats in an abstracted expanse of green, their being is meticulously articulated. From the soft pink patches of the neck scarf to the eyes that peer out towards the viewer from behind blue tinted lenses, Taylor imbues his subject with specificity and personality. The intensity and vivacity with which the artist paints is reflected by his brushwork—a network of kinetic strokes that capture a fleeting moment, alive with the intimacy characteristic of Taylor’s painting.
While individuals figure prominently in Taylor’s work, the artist rejects the reductive and simplified label of 'portraitist.' Taylor’s chosen subjects are only one piece of a larger body of people, and each painting reveals the multitude of forces at play — individual and societal — in the making of a person and a community. The result is not a mere idealized image, but a form of representational truth rooted in Taylor’s experience of contemporary existence.
About the artist
Henry Taylor’s imprint on the American cultural landscape comes from his disruption of tradition. While people figure prominently in Taylor’s work, he rejects the label of portraitist. Taylor’s chosen subjects are only one piece of the larger cultural narrative that they represent: his paintings reveal the forces at play, both individualistic and societal, that come to bear on his subject. The end result is not a mere idealized image, but a complete narrative of a person and his history. Taylor explains this pursuit of representational truth: ‘It’s about respect, because I respect these people. It’s a two-dimensional surface, but they are really three-dimensional beings.’[2]