CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/28/2023

Comprehensive, long-overdue retrospective of Henry Taylor opens at the Whitney

Untitled (2022) is reproduced from staff favorite Henry Taylor: B Side, published to accompany the largest exhibition of the Los Angeles artist's work to date, opening at the Whitney Museum of American Art throughout the next week, en route from MOCA LA . "Henry Taylor and his work are many things to many audiences," curator Bennett Simpson writes: "prolific, spontaneous, extroverted, big-hearted, heroic, occasionally melancholy, raw and fast, observant and witty. He is an artist of adjectives, slants of meaning that cannot help but append to his abiding subject, which is people. Taylor is a painter of people almost exclusively, and as such, he is a storyteller—indeed, he is one of the preeminent storytellers in contemporary art. … In works that deal in scenes from current events or that construct biting allegories of racial injustice, he extends a long tradition of modern history painting to new subjects and audiences. His representation of the diversity of Black experience, as he has lived and absorbed it over several decades of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is both affirming and dizzying, and it has been highly influential on younger generations."

Henry Taylor, Untitled, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 x 30 in. Image and work © Henry Taylor, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by Jeff McLane.