Project Room I:
Henry Taylor: Girrrrrl!

Los Angeles-based artist Henry Taylor’s paintings poignantly depict scenes from his personal life and his everyday experiences. The upcoming exhibition in Project Room 1 at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, titled Girrrrrrl!, will present a selection of new work. Taylor portrays friends and loved ones, childhood memories, and past encounters with lush, painterly strokes. He works on a range of surfaces, including canvas, cigarette and cereal boxes, found doors, suitcases, and other urban detritus. Through his insightful portraits and potent figurative work, Taylor comments on economic and racial disparities in the United States. Taylor’s encounters with homelessness and poverty before his enrollment at CalArts in his late thirties helped form a compelling practice, one that mixes an outsider sensibility with academic training. The work’s surfaces are loosely painted and often crudely unfinished, functioning as raw snap-shots of Taylor’s urban community. His portraits are often combined with language and logos from pop culture and products. Taylor’s exuberant colors and paint handling often belie an uneasiness—a vagrant iconography and a vocabulary of the urban poor. His works serve as artifacts and reminders of the existence of the economically disenfranchised, which he observes with an acute eye to detail and a profound insight into the human condition. Taylor has chosen an exhibition title that warmly refers to his mother and sister, as well as all his close female friends, while also making a sly allusion to the iconic Lichtenstein print, Grrrrrrrr!, featuring a growling, aggressive dog.