Philip Taaffe: Recent Paintings

by Taaffe Philip, Grabar Oleg, SEIDNER DAVID

First edition, first printing. Hardcover. Gray-green cloth-covered boards with title stamped in orange on cover, with photographically illustrated dust jacket. Paintings by Philip Taaffe. Conversation with the artist by Oleg Grabar. Portrait of the artist and studio photographs by David Seidner. Designed by Tony Morgan, Step Graphics Inc., New York. 44 pp., with 12 four-color plates and 11 additional illustrations (2 of which are in black-and-white). 13-1/4 x 11-1/4 inches. Published on the occasion of a 1994 exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery, New York. From the Gagosian "Taaffe is an iconoclast in the recent history of American Art. His paintings are the slow product of his wide-ranging meditations on the interrelation of generic forms and images in art, nature, architecture, and archaeology filtered through a critical and dynamic relation to the history of abstract painting, both occidental and oriental. Taaffe's oeuvre is remarkable for its visual exuberance and intricate craft. In a single work he combines the gestural impulses of action painting with the mechanical processes of silk-screening, as well as more archaic techniques, such as traditional gold-leaf illumination, relief printing, marbleizing, and subtle collage processes that are entirely his own innovation. Using these elaborate methods, he composes dazzling schemes of great eloquence and beauty out of a vast array of quotations and traces drawn from the storehouses of world culture."

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1994