via The Gagosian The art of Philip Taaffe via Sophie Munns

There is something subversive about Philip Taaffe’s interest in how information can be preserved and transferred from one medium to another. Since the early 1980s, when he first began gaining attention, he has mastered a wide range of processes — including collage, linocut, woodblock, rubber stamp, silkscreen, marbling and decalomania — to capture images, symbols and signs from various sources and convey them to paper and canvas. Although many discrete steps go into making one of his layered paintings, the collection, preservation and transmission of bits of information are central from start to finish. Through his imaginative repurposing of minor art forms — collage, printmaking, and marbling — Taaffe has dissolved the barriers separating artisanship from painting, effectively redefining the latter.

Philip Taaffe via Interview Magazine Philip Taaffe studio Philip Taaffe via Luhring Augustine Gallery Philip Taaffe, Algaciros, 2010 Philip Taaffe exhibition at Luhring Augustine Gallery Philip Taaffe, Strata Asplenium, 2014 Philip Taaffe studio Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe, Composition with Ornamental Fragments  Philip Taaffe, After Alcyonaria, 2011 Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe, Earth Star, 2012 Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe, via Gagosian Philip Taaffe works by NYC-based contemporary American painter--one of my favorites--Philip Taaffe--

Philip Taaffe via Interview Magazine Philip Taaffe studio Philip Taaffe via Luhring Augustine Gallery Philip Taaffe, Algaciros, 2010 Philip Taaffe exhibition at Luhring Augustine Gallery Philip Taaffe, Strata Asplenium, 2014 Philip Taaffe studio Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe, Composition with Ornamental Fragments  Philip Taaffe, After Alcyonaria, 2011 Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe, Earth Star, 2012 Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe, via Gagosian Philip Taaffe works by NYC-based contemporary American painter--one of my favorites--Philip Taaffe--

Taaffe is able to bring the exterior, visible world as well as the interior imagined world into his paintings. To me, this is what distinguishes him from his contemporaries.

Philip Taaffe, Untitled III, 1984. linoprint collage on vinyl, 53 x 67 inches (134.5 x 170 cm)

Read a Parkett text on Philip Taaffe Parkett Vol. 26 Quote from Parkett “Taaffe’s paintings are suffused with abandoned architecture, perambulations left open, fraught with possibilities—not closed, limited, bounded, imprisoned, like the grid. Tying ribbons around the bars of Western abstracti

Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe studio Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe Philip Taaffe One of my favorites--New York-based contemporary artist, Philip Taaffe

There is something subversive about Philip Taaffe’s interest in how information can be preserved and transferred from one medium to another. Since the early 1980s, when he first began gaining attention, he has mastered a wide range of processes — including collage, linocut, woodblock, rubber stamp, silkscreen, marbling and decalomania — to capture images, symbols and signs from various sources and convey them to paper and canvas. Although many discrete steps go into making one of his layered paintings, the collection, preservation and transmission of bits of information are central from start to finish. Through his imaginative repurposing of minor art forms — collage, printmaking, and marbling — Taaffe has dissolved the barriers separating artisanship from painting, effectively redefining the latter.

Mixing darkness and delight, artist Philip Taaffe responds to an ever-changing world in a new series of lushly patterned large-scale paintings

PHILIP TAAFFE Elisabeth, New Jersey 1955 Grand fond, 2004 Acrilico su carta, cm. 100 x 65,7 Firma al retro ESPOSIZIONI MAGI 900, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Bologna 2010. Catalogo mostra, p. 127 Autentica su foto dell'Artista

via The Gagosian The art of Philip Taaffe via Sophie Munns

Here's something to ponder for painters... TAAFFE: Essentially, I’m trying to make a primitive painting. I’m trying to summon the archaic. I want to enter into a primitive situation. This is my protest against the sensory deprivation that we experience, which is due to this tendency towards globalization, towards homogenization, towards the generic—a technological standard rather than an aesthetic standard. I’m mining history, trying to regenerate a pictorial situation that is more humanistic. It’s not about commodification, it’s not about fitting into some sort of corporate structure. It’s opposed to that direction. That is part of this piece from Interveiw magazine which I found today. October 2008 issue I've posted on Taaffe here before in May 2009... an early post when I had just started blogging and was very uncertain about the way I wanted to present ideas. However... I was never uncertain about this artist and his paintings or ideas. Since discovering his work some years back now I found myself drawn... and curiously ... able to resonate with certain leading themes and ideas in his work. Juncosa, Enrique (curator), Colm Toibin, and David Brody (artist interview). PHILIP TAAFFE: Anima Mundi. 128 pages, roughly 40 color plates, numerous color and b&w figures. Small folio, boards. Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2011. Exhibition in Dublin. Book available through Ursus books and prints. Composition with Egyptian Vessels 1998 Mixed media on board, 32 x 24 in (81 x 61 cm) Taaffe at work I found the following quotes about his work here. "What Taaffe has been doing now for almost three decades, as his paintings reveal again and again, is nothing less than bending the shape of time. He began by looking at art from the '60s; today he travels much further back, to earlier centuries, to ancient civilizations, searching for ways to reimagine the world in which we live that acknowledge those 'ancestral connections.'" Robert Nickas, Artforum, May 2008 "Mr. Taaffe aspires to the condition of an Oriental rug weaver: Strict yet playful, he intertwines a lexicon of motifs into inventive structures. Then again, great rugs usually achieve an internal dynamic; however much they play games with scale, they exude a sense of containment. Like mosques, they are conceived as symbolic portraits of the universe…In his new paintings, as much as ever, there is a bravura insolence in his collision of cultures, his insistence that everything can be reduced to ornament. But philosophically these sumptuous canvases can equally be argued the other way, as reminders that every ornament has its origins in something once deeply experienced. Mr. Taaffe's eclecticism long outgrew 1980s attitude in favor of an enlightened universalism. These accomplished, rich, thoughtful paintings mark the election of the artist as a trustee of what André Malraux termed the 'Museum Without Walls.'" David Cohen, The New York Sun, March 1, 2007 LEBENSZEICHEN - KUNSTMUSEUM - LUZERN via here. Well ... perhaps this is quite a foreign line of thinking for you? There are, after all, so many approaches, so many philosophical view points and ways into painting. A title I've used for a painting more than once is "archaic, yet reverberating still." For me that is a really important idea and in Taaffe I find an artist who extends this thought quite profoundly through his work. He has been recorded in interviews, had a number of critical commentary pieces written on his work... and you can read more at his website. Also really engaging are his studio viewings here. Its late so I will pop back tomorrow to check for spelling mistakes and such! cheerio, Sophie

There used to be a time when curators could slap a label on a group of artists, claiming the work to be central, progressive, and an important part of their narrative of art history.