Henry Taylor

Refreshingly, Henry Taylor’s current show—crammed with painted works and assemblage sculptures of all shapes and sizes, all made between 1997 and the present—feels neither like a painting show nor an installation environment, though it functions as both. With a raw plywood couch, several chairs, and a makeshift coffee table resting on plastic crates anchoring the center of the gallery, the exhibition suggests the warmth and worn familiarity of a lived-in space, cluttered with evidence of heavy use: Ashtrays, a drinking glass left with the red dregs of old wine, incomplete scrawlings on the walls and tabletops, stale biscuits petrifying in a corner, the fading smell of incense, and an iPod found paused, in one instance, in the middle of Curtis Mayfield’s “We the People Who Are Darker than Blue.” Conventional gallery lighting has been replaced with floor lamps and impromptu chandeliers made from suspended cardboard boxes sheathing bare bulbs. Prints on paper and larger canvases—several with strong yet restrained syncopated compositions—hang on the walls, while a proliferation of smaller paintings made mostly on variously sized cardboard boxes, cereal cartons, and cigarette packs lean casually against the walls, stack on boxes, and stand upright in clusters on ad hoc shelves and tabletops.

Taylor’s sustained considerations of race are apparent throughout: from his continuous work in portraiture to the inclusion of an enlarged photo of Martin Luther King Jr. throwing a football, an Obama election flyer, and a magazine clipping of James Brown at the Hollywood Bowl. A white porcelain bowl full of black charcoal briquettes offers quiet poetic resonance. But above all, an exciting and fluid ambiguity exists between things readily recognized as art objects and the practical furnishings and ephemera brought in and rearranged from the artist’s studio. Taylor’s material resourcefulness, dictated by economic necessity, affirms the exuberance that emerges where paintings cover the scraps and surfaces of living.