Al Taylor Early Paintings

Al Taylor began his studio practice as a painter and although he is more widely known for the three-dimensional works he started making in 1985, the artist maintained that his constructions weren’t “at all about sculptural concerns; [they come] from a flatter set of traditions.” Throughout his career, whether he worked on canvas, drawings and prints, or sculpture, the creative process of Taylor’s oeuvre was fundamentally grounded in the formal concerns of painting. Published on the occasion of an exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, in spring 2017, Al Taylor: Early Paintings is the first book to focus exclusively on the artist’s works on canvas, featuring a selection of rarely seen paintings created between 1971 and 1980. New scholarship by poet and art critic John Yau examines the visual relationships that connect Taylor’s paintings, drawings, and sculptural objects, while also reflecting on the art world in New York City during the 1970s. In addition, a conversation conducted by Mimi Thompson between renowned painters Stanley Whitney and Billy Sullivan—all of whom knew Taylor well during his lifetime—provides insight into his reputation as an “artist’s artist.” Twenty-six paintings are at the heart of this catalogue—embodying the subtleties of reduction and restraint, they nonetheless have hints of the idiosyncratic playfulness that would come to characterize Taylor’s later works. In some canvases, the artist delineates spatial perspectives by incorporating the wall in shaped compositions where a single color often dominates; elsewhere, it is the interaction of his color juxtapositions and fluid paint application that energize the canvas. Both painterly and sculptural in their address, these works deviate from the usual tropes of abstraction to uniquely engage space, perception, and possess a lyrical rhythm. This new publication reveals and validates the importance of Al Taylor’s paintings both within his own practice and in the context of twentieth-century abstraction.

Featuring nearly eighty drawings and pages from a dozen sketchbooks that span Al Taylor's entire career, this book documents the artist's important achievements as a draftsman. This book investigates important and illuminating aspects of Al Taylor's drawings, which numbered over five thousand at the time of his death. It includes a chronological survey of Taylor's drawings from the mid-1980s, when he abandoned painting in favor of sculpture and drawing, and highlights the combination of technical refinement, humor, and sensuousness that characterizes his works on paper. Stunning reproductions of the works, which were inspired by such ordinary things as tin cans, pet stains, and broomsticks, reveal the drawings' minute details, nuanced shading, and playfully agile pencil lines. Lively texts explore how the rich and complex visual sensibilities of Taylor's drawings resonate with that of late Renaissance and Baroque Old Masters. The book also examines Taylor's innovative approach to process and materials, such as photocopier toner, with its intense black, and the extreme white of correction fluid. Created with equal parts humor and technical virtuosity, and informed by scientific models as well as everyday minutiae, Al Taylor's magnificent drawings are meditations on form and structure that stand as testament to great draftsmanship. Published with the Morgan Library & Museum

"American artist Al Taylor, who was born in 1948, considered himself more of a painter and draftsman than a sculptor. His European breakthrough was triggered by a series of exhibitions in the early nineties. In barely thirty years, he produced an extraordinarily diverse range of very personal and self-willed works, which following his early death in 1999 have been put into new perspective. In addition to his three-dimensional works, Taylor's drawings are at the center of attention. His inspiration often came from the observation of banal objects and curious situations, and his works reflect his sensitivity to the bizarre and a deep humor which is based on the fact that often the most trivial occasions can be a vehicle to extremely "serious" experiments. Few artists of his generation had a similar range of expressive means, in which sensuality and discipline, energy and control are united."--BOOK JACKET.

Companion exhibition catalog, paired with the art show: Artists Quarantine With Their Art Collections, Guest Curated by Stephen Maine, for the Martin Art Gallery, running from November 17 - February 6, 2022. Introduction by Paul M. Nicholson, with essay by Stephen Maine

Bridging the fields of conservation, art history, and museum curating, this volume contains the principal papers from an international symposium titled "Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice" at the University of Leiden in Amsterdam, Netherlands, from June 26 to 29, 1995. The symposium—designed for art historians, conservators, conservation scientists, and museum curators worldwide—was organized by the Department of Art History at the University of Leiden and the Art History Department of the Central Research Laboratory for Objects of Art and Science in Amsterdam. Twenty-five contributors representing museums and conservation institutions throughout the world provide recent research on historical painting techniques, including wall painting and polychrome sculpture. Topics cover the latest art historical research and scientific analyses of original techniques and materials, as well as historical sources, such as medieval treatises and descriptions of painting techniques in historical literature. Chapters include the painting methods of Rembrandt and Vermeer, Dutch 17th-century landscape painting, wall paintings in English churches, Chinese paintings on paper and canvas, and Tibetan thangkas. Color plates and black-and-white photographs illustrate works from the Middle Ages to the 20th century.

Having begun his studio practice as a painter and draftsman, in 1985 Al Taylor (1948-1999) devised a uniquely innovative approach to process and materials that seamlessly enveloped drawings and three-dimensional objects as he created compositions that were grounded in the formal concerns of painting. Taylor ultimately sought to expand the possibilities of vision in his search for new ways of experiencing and imagining space, and his multi-layered investigations of perception across variant dimensions provide the viewer with an insight into the artist's idiosyncratic thinking, his methodology, and his playful sense of humor. Published on the occasion of the artist’s 2015 exhibition at the gallery, this catalogue presents a comprehensive examination of Taylor’s Pet Stains and Puddles, which encompass a large grouping of interconnected series that were created between 1989 and 1992; as well as works from Taylor’s later series Full Gospel Neckless (sic) that the artist made in Denmark for his 1997 solo exhibition at Galleri Tommy Lund. The objects and drawings that comprise these series demonstrate Taylor’s relentless curiosity about the process of seeing—that is, how we see and what we see, which he systematically explored by applying a multitude of constantly shifting points of view. The artist’s investigations combined metaphor with seemingly incongruous materials and concepts in order to find new relationships between subject matter, space, and meaning. This fully illustrated publication will feature new scholarship on Taylor’s work by Mimi Thompson.