Over the last few years, the Musée Picasso in Paris has explored the Spanish painter’s influence on modern and contemporary American artists, including Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and Faith Ringgold. Now it is presenting some 100 paintings, sculptures and painted objects by Henry Taylor (b. 1958), spanning his entire career and curated in collaboration with the artist (8 April–6 September). Taylor’s expressive, colourful depictions of friends, celebrities and passers-by and his paintings of public spaces have drawn comparisons with the work of Kerry James Marshall, but his flattened picture planes and distorted faces mark him out as one of the more interesting inheritors of cubism. This retrospective demonstrates, among other things, Taylor’s grasp of the mythic as well as the personal. The recurring motif of horses, for example, suggests liberty and mobility, but the darker connotations – from the fact of the animal’s exploitation to the complex legacy of the Civil War-era ‘40 acres and a mule’ directive – lend these paintings a troubling tension that have left a clear mark on younger painters such as the late Noah Davis.
Find out more from the Musée Picasso’s website.
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