NEW YORK, NY.- Sue Scott Gallery presents Craig Taylor: Paintings and Drawings, a solo exhibition of new work opening June 30 and on view through August 5, 2011.
Taylor’s continued investigations of painting and drawing offer both the aesthetic experience arrived at through historical approaches to abstraction and the interplay of image associations. Subject matter appears, dissolves, and reemerges into a broader meditation on the nature of abstraction and the painted object as emotive. Taylor displays an acute awareness of the conventions and limitations of both abstraction and representation, constructing his work on the continuum between the two experiences. He operates within the traditions of Post-War American abstraction, but not strictly within their formal languages: chunks of image float to the surface and create their own vernacular of signs and marks. A narrative unfolds through an understanding of how the painting is made. Erotic serenity and clarity of thought collide with scatological playfulness, and the historical role of abstraction as a vehicle for the artist’s libido is alternately parodied and given free reign.
While Taylor’s work is freighted with a 20th century American concern for the role and nature of abstract painting it is simultaneously buoyed by a romantic touch rooted in 19th century French tradition. The space in the canvases is alternately atmospheric and descriptive, immediate and subtle, with painterly insouciance tempered by the presence of Surrealist grotesqueries and aggressive structural devices. Loose, luminous areas come to coexist with opaque graphic forms. His paintings and drawings are keyed into an alternately fuzzy and crystalline perceptual reality that is all at once airy, corporeal, concrete, lurid, aggressive and delicate.
Taylor’s influences are as diverse as Henri Matisse and Carroll Dunham, Pat Steir and Peter Saul, all of whom provide a context for the gestures and marks that coalesce and fragment in these paintings, forming and reconstituting moments of pictorial and narrative legibility. Poetic and ruminative without being bound to tradition, funny and knowing without being defined by the rhetoric of postmodernism, the works are stylish and relevant without being subject to the whims of art world fashion.
Taylor received his BFA from Maine College of Art and his MFA from Yale University. He has had solo shows at March Gallery in New York, La Montagne in Boston, and Test: Showroom, Berlin. He has been included in numerous group exhibitions at various galleries among them CTRL Gallery, Houston, Texas; 106 Greene, Brooklyn, New York; Bakalar and Paine Galleries, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston; and Fred [London], Leipzig. Taylor has taught at RISD, Massachusetts College of Art, Pratt, Brandeis University, and Yale University.
He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. This is his first exhibition with Sue Scott Gallery.
