CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/11/2022

'Alison Elizabeth Taylor: The Sum of It' is new from DelMonico Books & Addison Gallery

Featured spreads are from new release Alison Elizabeth Taylor: The Sum of It. Published to accompany the exhibition opening October 15 at Des Moines Art Center (en route to the Addison Gallery), this is the first major monograph on the rising artist whose intricate, even classical, inlaid-wood paintings paradoxically depict gritty scenes of real life, down in the trenches. "Taylor’s approach to painting appears unlimited in its scope, from abstractions to scenes of daily life, landscapes and interiors, to fantasy and portraiture," Lynne Tillman writes. "She discovered materials that mattered to her, that elicited uncanny realities, making the familiar unfamiliar by incorporating what isn’t commonly there—the unreality of lived reality, the genuine oddness of how things are, how they look, and what could be there. She paints fantasies, dreams, wishes as inherent interiors. Ultimately, Taylor’s depictions also problematize the nature of painting and naturalness itself. The questions that arise from art, thoughts it provokes, associations viewers draw from it, are its answers—how it is seen in the present. Taylor’s art responds to our contemporary moment, contentious, divided, pieces that do and don’t fit together, and looking at her work, I think about the fragility of personality, divided identities, and how the everyday entails the effort to get oneself together."