The reviews for Henry Taylor's recent retrospective, Henry Taylor: B-Side, which traveled from MOCA Los Angeles to The Whitney, New York, were unequivocal.
‘Henry Taylor's 'B Side' Is Full of Grade-A Paintings’, ran the The New York Times’ headline. The Los Angeles Times characterized the show as a ‘Vital retrospective filled with unforgettable art' and The New Yorker wrote that 'The painter’s strengths emerge not from empathy but from a strange, almost compulsive insight.'
Rolling Stone’s review meanwhile, referenced how, ‘Taylor superimposes the past onto the present, overlaying the world we know now with the history of being Black in America’, while also noting that Kendrick Lamar had used Taylor’s paintings as a backdrop on the rapper’s recent tour.
HENRY TAYLOR - Portrait of Andy Robert, 2024
Coutesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photography Brica Wilcox
It's not surprising that the show was celebrated as the most consequential museum exhibition of 2023. The loving attention Taylor pays to his subjects – some of whom are also friends and acquaintances, others public figures, others drawn from photographs, books, and from history – makes for works that surpass the limits of a portrait’s frame.
Taylor's art captures not only faces, but also expresses the wider social forces at work within his subjects’ lives. That mix of personal history and public context is in evidence in a new Artspace edition released today.
Portrait of Andy Robert, 2024 is released by Artspace in collaboration with Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Combining flat planes of color with areas of generous detail and loose brushstrokes, the new limited edition print, like Taylor's paintings, radiates with life.
HENRY TAYLOR - Portrait of Andy Robert, 2024
Photography Brica Wilcox
Portrait of Andy Robert, 2024 is based on Taylor's 2018 painting of the same name, and is a 12-color silkscreen on Coventry Rag 30gsm paper. It's limited to 100 copies and 6APs. Paper size is 26 x 18 inches, image size is 22 x 14 3/4 inches. As with all Artspace editions, framing options are available.
Taylor is known for creating empathetic portraits that present holistic, complex, and deeply human narratives. “It’s about respect, because I respect these people. It’s a two-dimensional surface, but they are
really three-dimensional beings,” he says.
The timing of the Artspace and Skowhegan edition caps off an incredibly successful recent run for the Los Angeles painter.
HENRY TAYLOR - Portrait of Andy Robert, 2024
Photography Brica Wilcox
As well as the ecstatically received MOCA and Whitney retrospective, his 2007 work, From Congo to the Capital, and black again, a critical reworking of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, recently sold at Sotheby’s, New York for just under $2.5m, almost doubling its high estimate.
But even that record may not remain in place for long. Works such as his 2017 painting, Cicely and Miles Visit the Obamas (a fanciful depiction of Miles Davis and his wife Cicely Tyson visiting the Obama-era White House); his 2015-17 canvas, Ancestors of Genghis Khan with Black Man on horse (which alludes to the killing of Taylor’s grandfather, a horse trainer and draftsman, in 1933); and THE TIMES THAY AIN’T A CHANGING, FAST ENOUGH! also from 2017 (showing the killing of police-shooting victim Philando Castile the year before) are widely regarded as 21st-century American masterpieces.
If you'd like the chance to buy an edition by this Hauser & Wirth represented artist take a closer look at Portrait of Andy Robert, 2024 here.
HENRY TAYLOR - Portrait of Andy Robert, 2024
Photography Brica Wilcox
Taylor's work is in prominent public collections including The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx NY, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg PA, The Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston MA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles CA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York NY, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles CA, Museum of Fine Art, Houston TX, Museum of Modern Art, New York NY, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham NC, Pérez Art Museum, Miami FL, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco CA, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York NY, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY.
HENRY TAYLOR - Portrait of Andy Robert, 2024
Photography Brica Wilcox
