|
The American artist Al Taylor (born Springfield, Missouri, 1948) saw drawing and sculpture as two aspects of a single process, a form of speculative investigation into his surroundings. His work proposes an entirely individual take on the visual and spatial properties of the world around him; from the piss stains left by dogs on the pavement, to wave theory, the possibilities of x-ray vision, and the creation of ‘sighting devices’ using tin cans and bottle rings. Taylor’s is a unique sensibility. His work is typified by an engaging wit, a love of language, curiosity and a searching intellect. It represents a form of questioning, asking, what if?
‘I normally make drawings to forget (record) something that I have been thinking (looking) about; but it usually backfires and just gives me something new to think (look) about (to record). I don’t think too well, but I can look OK.’
Taylor moved to New York from his childhood home in Kansas in 1970. He spent the ensuing fifteen years focusing on painting, before shifting his emphasis to sculpture and drawing in the mid-1980s. He was Robert Rauschenberg’s studio assistant 1975-82 and while he exhibited widely in his lifetime he has become known as an ‘artist’s artist’ who knew and was admired by a diverse group including Rauschenberg, Brice Marden, James Rosenquist and Cy Twombly.
In the thirty years before his early death in 1999 Taylor developed an extraordinarily diverse body of work, including sculptures in steel, wood, wire and found materials such as broomsticks, inner tubes and net floats, as well as paintings and drawings in many media. Taylor’s exhibition at Haunch of Venison, London, which will be the artist’s first show in the UK, will include work from a number of different series from late 1980s and 1990s. It aims to introduce him to a British audience by demonstrating the breadth and richness of his practice.
Following his first solo exhibition, at the Alfred Kren Gallery, New York in 1986, Taylor had many shows in galleries in the US, Germany, Switzerland and Denmark. He exhibited at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1992, and at the Kunstmuseum, Lucerne in 1999. In 2006 Al Taylor: Puddles was shown at Haunch of Venison, Zurich and he was honoured with a major drawings retrospective at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. Taylor’s work is in a number of important museum collections, including MoMA, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, Graphische Sammlung Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (tbc).
For information and images please contact: Claire Walsh
Call +44 (0) 20 7936 1296 or email cwalsh@brunswickgroup.com
|
return to artnet.com
![Untitled [Shrunken Heads with Vision]](http://images.artnet.com/artwork_images/161/261351t.jpg)