Henry Taylor

FROM SUGAR TO SHIT

14 October 2023 – 7 January 2024

Paris

About

Hauser & Wirth’s inaugural exhibition in Paris will debut new works by critically acclaimed Los Angeles artist Henry Taylor, whose major career survey arrives at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York on 4 October 2023 and will remain on view through 7 January 2024. Taylor’s exhibition in Paris will comprise a wide range of paintings and sculpture encompassing the remarkable breadth of his practice. Throughout his four-decade long career, Taylor has consistently and simultaneously embraced and rejected the tenets of traditional painting, as well as any formal label. Combining figurative, landscape and history painting, alongside drawing, installation and sculpture, Taylor’s vast body of highly personal work is rooted in the people and communities closest to him, often manifested together with poignant historical or pop-culture references. In this exhibition, with a guiding sense of human connection, Taylor leads us through a multifaceted narrative in sculpture and painting.

In the lead up to this show, Taylor extended his studio practice to Paris for a residency in the city during the months of June and July 2023. During this time, Taylor has drawn inspiration from the unparalleled array of historical art collections contained in the city, such as the Musée D’Orsay where he was surrounded by the work of French Impressionists, Expressionists and Fauvists who have inspired him since an early age. Taylor’s studied awareness of his art historical predecessors is continually prevalent throughout his work, having previously painted versions of works by Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Philip Guston, Gerhard Richter, David Hammons and Glenn Ligon, among others.

Sculpture plays an important role in this exhibition and as part of Taylor’s practice. The process involves energetically building, stacking and affixing a vast array of collected objects together, from bottle caps to toilet paper rolls, to create a holistic record of his everyday routine and the materials that define them. Referring to this highly intuitive process as ‘hunting and gathering,’ the artist is able to simultaneously merge multiple references—historic and contemporary—into sharp focus. Examples featured in the Paris show include assemblages made using milk bottles, bicycle wheels and baseball bats which recode the forms and symbolisms of found materials to comment on enduring art historical tropes, echoing an almost Duchamp-esque approach to readymade sculpture. When paired with Taylor’s paintings depicting various figures throughout history, these works reveal the artist’s voracious sourcing of subjects and materials, as well as his encyclopaedic command of historical knowledge. Also on view in the exhibition is a monumental sculpture entitled ‘One tree per family’ (2023), a towering 15ft tree trunk with a large afro for foliage.

Taylor’s work is primarily about relationships and how they impact our lives. While people figure prominently in his work, the artist rejects the label of portraitist. The paintings in this exhibition include subjects from all walks of life and historical context, frequently featuring family members, as seen in ‘I got brothers ALL OVA the world but they forget we’re related’ (2023), a group portrait of Taylor’s brothers painted against a graphic backdrop displaying the word ‘VICTORY,’ resembling the logo of the classic American bubble gum brand. Taylor is known for his playful visual and verbal punning, as symbols slip between different representations in his work: the allusion to bubblegum is a nod to the subjects’ youth, while also celebrating their graduation day. Additionally on show, ‘Father, Son, Fun’ (2023) depicts Martin Luther King Jr. playing baseball with a child, ‘‘Another country,’ Ben Vereen’ (2023) portrays American actor, dancer and singer Ben Vereen and a painting made during Taylor’s time in Paris in homage to Josephine Baker, the American-born French dancer, singer and actress, often considered to be the first Black superstar. Taylor’s choice of subject—from memory and archival materials to the live sitter—is firmly dependent upon his sense of connection driven by empathy. His sumptuous depictions, painted rapidly and loosely, capture his subject’s nuances and mood with gestures and passages of flat, saturated acrylic colour offset by areas of rich and intricate detail. The intensity with which he paints is reflected by his brushwork: a network of kinetic strokes that seek to capture a feeling before it flees. Taylor’s subjects, which range from members of the Black community to symbolic objects representative of historical struggle, span the breadth of the human condition; each work is a holistic visual biography and permanent record of a person or people’s history.

Image: Henry Taylor, I got brothers ALL OVA the world but they forget we’re related, 2023 © Henry Taylor. Photo: Keith Lubow

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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.’[1]