The Drawings Of Al Taylor

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

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.

"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.

The delicate Postminimalist sculptures and drawings of the American artist Al Taylor (1948-1999) were for a long time better known in Europe than in the U.S., despite Taylor's residing in New York. Laboring quietly from the mid-1980s until his premature death from cancer at the age of 51, Taylor made abstract drawings and sculptures derived from found materials that refresh both abstraction and Postminimalism with their gentle humor and lightness of touch. Working in a decade that favored less discreet gestures, Taylor never loomed large in the New York art world's consciousness (despite his brief tenure as a studio assistant to Robert Rauschenberg). Alongside an increasing number of exhibitions, this publication helps to remedy that oversight, providing a catalogue raisonn of Taylor's graphic works, thereby retrieving a previously little-known aspect of his oeuvre. Aside from the published prints, it also reproduces all of the artist's proofs and variants, which often differ significantly from the final versions.

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.

This publication focuses on two bodies of work by Al Taylor, Pass the Peas and Can Studys. Although distinctly individual, both of these series examine Taylor's ongoing explorations of the circle. Instigated by curiosity, the artist studies the inside and outside of circular shapes and investigates their multi-dimensional possibilities. Taylor playfully explores these permutations in his Pass the Peas series from 1991-92. In addition to completing an array of drawings, he used tubular materials such as hula-hoops, garden hose, and plastic-coated cable to create three-dimensional spirals and coils, interlocking loops, and dissected circles that were mounted on the wall, left freestanding, or hung by wires from the ceiling to activate changing perspectives. The artist's investigations into the infinite possibilities of a circle were further pursued during 1993 in his Can Studys series, when he expanded his "research" by exploring the play of light that would theoretically be reflected off of the exterior--or projected out of the interior of cylindrical forms.

retrospective of artist Al Taylor