Phliip Taaffe, Plowshare (2022), via Luhring Augustine
This month, Luhring Augustine presents an exhibition of recent paintings by Philip Taaffe, on view in the gallery’s Tribeca location. Featuring intimate kaleidoscopic panels realized in monotype and collage, and rooted in a process recently developed by the artist, the show expands on Taaffe’s celebrated ability to build complex compositions, and cull from a wide variety of sources, from illuminated manuscripts to historical natural science materials.
Phliip Taaffe, Composition with Spiders and Wasps I (2022), via Luhring Augustine
Taaffe’s work has long embraced collage-like approaches to composition, pulling together various graphical forms and modes of imagistic assemblage to create intricate, symmetrically-charged works that manage to both expand in many directions at once while sharing a consistent methodological starting point. As the world withdrew into isolation in 2020, Taaffe embarked upon a deeper investigation of certain graphic experiments he has been exploring perennially, but now with a more intensive focus. These works mark a continued exploration of a monotype process using lithographic ink on plate glass, which he has termed “litho-scraping,†an expressive manner of cutting into and manipulating viscous colored inks with various instruments across the surface of the glass. The result is a broad range of marks, from rigid graphic impasto, to supple transparent washes.
Philip Taaffe, Columnar Figure I (Gate of Horn) (2022), via Luhring Augustine
Taaffe pulls from a range of varied of mythological and philosophical ranges, from Nepenthe, the fictional medicine described as promoting the forgetfulness of sorrow. The paintings suggest the alluring and complex nature of Nepenthe through their framework of vivid sectioning, creating an optical experience in which levels of consciousness coalesce under our gaze. Drawing from the landscape outside his studio, Taaffe would use images of birds, predatory insects, and amphibians to reinforce a sense of harmony in the natural world. The paintings in this exhibition offer an access point to a hidden realm of images that allows viewers to enter multi-faceted worlds within worlds. Not only does each composition offer passage to new domains, presenting the works together provides a means of experiencing the shared sensibility between them.
The artist’s work is on view through December 22nd.
Philip Taaffe, Panel with Larger Frogs (2022), via Luhring Augustine
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Philip Taaffe [Exhibition Site]
