Philip Taaffe

The painter Philip Taaffe is widely celebrated for his cerebral and painterly abstractions. He has experimented with painting, printing, and drawing, and although his work can be polymorphous, it always carries a distinctive psychedelic aura that pulls equally from the history of 20th century art and the past millennium’s esoterica. He has travelled extensively in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and the influences of those non-western cultures are eminently palpable in his work. Much of Taaffe’s work uses complex patterning and geometric forms, both invented and naturally occurring. Paintings from the late 1990s used as their models the repetitious, fractal growth of ferns and corals. Paintings from earlier in that decade utilized compounded waveforms like those found in some Op art. The subjects were very different but the images bear a striking continuity. Taaffe’s 2000 mixed media painting on linen, Reef, combines two such similar artworks, using a florid, rainbow-like color scheme. The repeated photographic image of a reef is overlaid with wavy lines, which are both optically illusive and reminiscent of water, adding dynamism and movement to the composition.

Taaffe has shown widely in New York, Europe, India, and the Middle East. His work is held in collections at the Guggenheim, MoMA, Brandeis University, the Reina Sofia, and the Whitney. He has been the subject of numerous solo museum exhibitions, two Lyon Biennials, the Sydney Biennial, the Whitney Biennial, and others.