HENRY TAYLOR

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1 November 2024 – 15 February 2025

Over the past four decades, critically acclaimed, Los Angeles-based artist Henry Taylor has created a vast body of highly personal work that combines figurative, landscape and history painting, alongside drawing, installation and sculpture. For his first exhibition at Hauser & Wirth New York, Taylor moves into a new technical realm, debuting a series of limited-edition etchings and hand-painted monoprints, all produced in collaboration with Paulson Fontaine Press in Berkeley CA. Spanning from the humorous to the contemplative, this intimate collection of new works both distills and expands Taylor’s practice. It also serves as a record of the artist’s time spent in Berkeley, just a short distance from Laney College in Oakland, where he took his first etching class in the late 1970s.

Known for saturated color passages, gestural mark making and a rapid style of execution, Taylor’s work emerges from his relentless cataloging of imagery, experiences and imaginings. The artist’s printmaking is likewise a rich amalgam of life and invention, guided by a deep empathy for his subjects and extensive repertoire of influences. The works on view here include still lifes, portraits, fictive landscapes and scenes of family and friends. Many of these printed works draw inspiration from earlier paintings, incorporating recurring imagery and themes while revisiting former compositions. For example, with the print ‘It wasn’t just Sunday, it was Easter Sunday and I had to wear a dress!’ (2024), Taylor returns to a 2011 painting he based off a photograph of his late mother and his daughter when she was a young child. Experimenting with color variations, he adopts the palette of French painter and printmaker Édouard Vuillard. In other iterations of the print, Taylor isolates and modifies specific elements, shaping the overall emotional quality and texture of each piece. Several intimate black-and-white etchings, including one of his late friend and fellow artist Pope.L, are meditations on mortality and loss.

Printmaking introduces a new collaborative dimension to Taylor’s practice, which he likens to the relationship between a musician and producer. It also brings a different tempo and physicality to his aesthetic pursuits. In these prints, Taylor’s skill as a colorist is particularly evident; for instance, the same piercing self-portrait—present across three different works—shifts in meaning and nuance via the visceral impact of each version’s unique combination of color and line. In ‘Fade to Black, I Did Not Pay the Electric Bill’ (2024), Taylor ultimately blocks out most of the color, a technique he often employs in his paintings. By completely obscuring an entire scene or text, Taylor ensures that only he knows what remains hidden underneath. Similarly, in a private tribute on the back of a still life inspired by Beckmann and Manet, the artist lists names—of loved ones, of the printers at Paulson Fontaine and of familiars who have recently died—further highlighting the medium’s expressive potential.

About Paulson Fontaine Press
Paulson Fontaine Press produces and publishes limited edition intaglio prints. Established in 1996, the press emerged from the San Francisco Bay Area’s rich tradition of fine art printmaking. Paulson Fontaine Press’s philosophy is to facilitate rather than direct an artist to create an environment where artists can do their best work. Pam Paulson and Rhea Fontaine have a strong shared interest in the history of American civil rights, which has influenced their publishing decisions. As a woman and minority-owned business, they have worked to amplify often underrepresented voices in the visual arts. PFP has published 200 editions with Black Artists, and this archive was recently acquired by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art.

Image: 2024 © Henry Taylor. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Paulson Fontaine Press. Photo: Smeeta Mahanti

Henry Taylor at Paulson Fontaine Press, Berkeley CA, 2024

About the Artist

Henry Taylor

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...