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
Posted inBooks
A Tribute to New York’s Wilting Flower District
If cities had such things as official botanicals, New York City’s might be the flower bouquet.
Posted inArt
Master of Many
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.
Posted inArt
Painting as an Occult Practice: Philip Taaffe’s Recent Work
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.