JAMES JARVAISE, HENRY TAYLOR

Travelling from Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, the exhibition will feature over seven decades of works that explorethe artists’ mutual interest in the figure and landscape. On view will be paintings and drawings from Jarvaise’sHudson River School series, which was included in the famous 1959 exhibition ‘Sixteen Americans’ at TheMuseum of Modern Art, New York, in which Jay DeFeo, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stellaalso debuted as emerging artists. These historic works will be presented along with modernist collages fromthe 1950s and figurative paintings from the 1960s that were specifically chosen by Taylor. Encapsulating morethan three decades, Taylor’s own work is represented by over 40 paintings to concentrate on portraits offriends, family and strangers, figure studies, neighborhood scenes and landscapes.

Henry Taylor credits James Jarvaise with having been the first to recognize his talents in the early 1980s. Atthe time, Taylor was supporting himself as a psychiatric technician at the Camarillo State Mental Hospital whilepursuing a range of interests, including classes in journalism, cultural anthropology and set design at OxnardCollege. There, he repeatedly enrolled in Jarvaise’s painting class, where he was introduced to the works ofMax Beckmann, Jean Dubuffet, Philip Guston, Cy Twombly and other modernists who were entirely new tohim. The title is taken from advice Jarvaise imparted to his student: the words of a vital teacher who offeredTaylor many lessons on how to build a painting with integrity.

When exhibited together, the works of Jarvaise and Taylor appear to be in clear dialogue with oneanother. Works such as Jarvaise’s Hudson River School Series, alongside Taylor’s paintings featuringlandscapes, have a strikingly similar resonance and shared sensibility. ‘Sometimes a straight line has to be crooked’ connects Jarvaise and Taylor formally—works on view spotlight the two artists’ approaches tomassing flat shapes that move between figuration and abstraction, and their talent for deploying off-beatcolors, strong tones, straight horizons and curvaceous lines—and unites them energetically across time.

Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.