LA gallery Blum & Poe hosts its fourth solo show of work by California born artist Henry Taylor, with a new film by Kahil Joseph. Henry Taylor’s acrylic paintings illustrate people who occupy very different public, private, interior and exterior spaces across the entire spectrum of American society. “My paintings are what I see around me… They are my landscape paintings,” he says. Henry’s work highlights the social and political issues – racial inequality, homelessness and poverty – faced by African-Americans across the country.
His paintings are largely portraits which focus tightly on their sitters, in doing so forcing the viewer to consider the lives of his widely ranging subjects including friends, family, homeless strangers and significant characters in the African-American community from sports figures to the pioneers of the Black Panther and Civil Rights movements and celebrities.
Henry’s show at Blum & Poe show is installed across three very different rooms. Together, the three rooms pull together the divergent lives of Henry’s sitters, while taking care to emphasise the perceived differences between them. The first room echoes the play spaces and wastelands used for temporary housing that Henry encountered as a teenager growing up in Oxnard, California. The floor of the room is packed with dirt and rocks. Out of the ground bursts a tree, it’s branches brutally cut off into stumps. Grey concrete blocks are sprayed with graffiti and the white gallery walls are tagged with spray paint. A pile of push bikes lies part-hidden under a bright blue tarpaulin sheet.
The show’s second room sharply contrast with the first. Guarded by huge metal gates painted in white, the room is a vision of private pleasure and luxury. Through the gates, in the place of greying dirt there is lush green astro grass and a sculpture of a swimming pool filled with foam woggle floats. A third room is installed to recall an artist’s — perhaps Henry’s — studio. Paint pots are scattered chaotically across the floor and on a large white table.
The three rooms and the paintings within each room make up a portrait of modern LA: its increasingly gentrified Skid Row, where Henry lives and works, the city’s diverse community and the cultural cues that echo beyond LA and across the world.
Henry Taylor’s show featuring Kahil Joseph is at Blum & Poe, LA, until 5 November 2016.
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Bryony joined It's Nice That as Deputy Editor in August 2016, following roles at Mother, Secret Cinema, LAW, Rollacoaster and Wonderland. She later became Acting Editor at It's Nice That, before leaving in late 2018.