Michael Taylor has observed the changing colours and atmospheric conditions of NSW’s Monaro district and southern coastline for over forty years. Dominated by a range of blues and purples from light to dark, this exhibition records night, sea, sky and rain. His paintings draw on his infinitely textured experience of nature – its moods and elemental sensations. Their expressive sweep of energy also charts his own movement within the landscape, either on foot or by car. Time, space, water and light are exhilaratingly conflated into vivid, shifting concentrations of paint and colour.

This exhibition comes after Taylor’s first complete survey, Michael Taylor: 1963–2016, was presented at the Canberra Museum and Gallery in 2016. Taylor has exhibited regularly since 1963 after completing his diploma at the National Art School (then East Sydney Technical College). In 1971 he relocated to the Monaro region south of Canberra and today divides his time between his property in Cooma and the far south coast.

The National Gallery of Australia holds the most extensive collection of Taylor’s works, numbering 115 paintings, collages and drawings. He is also included in the collections of BHP, Joye Art Foundation, High Court of Australia, Parliament House Art Collection, Artbank, Art Gallery of NSW, National Gallery of Victoria, Queensland Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Western Australia and the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Taylor has participated in important international and Australian exhibitions including the Biennale des Jeunes, Paris (1963); Contemporary Australian Painting, Los Angeles (1966); Australian Art Today, touring South-East Asia (1969); Ten Australians, touring Europe (1974–75); Landscape and Abstraction, Nolan Gallery (1986); I had a dream, NGV (1996); and more recently, Moist, NGA (2005); and Fireworks, touring QLD, NSW and VIC regional galleries (2005).

This will be the artist’s fifth solo show at Gallery 9.

Press release courtesy Gallery 9.