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Philip Taaffe

Exhibition — les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse

Philip Taaffe, exhibition view, Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, 2005
© Printemps de Septembre, photo André Morin

Born in 1955 in Elizabeth (USA), he lives in New York.

 

Philip Taaffe's painting is based at once on representation, on iconoclasm, on the image and on decoration. It is abstract, but also immaterial, ephemeral, and organic. His pictures are concerned with form and figure, and with contemplation and appearances.

 

The series of works that he has selected for one of the rooms at les Abattoirs – Musée Frac Occitanie Toulouse sweeps aside the decorative taboo to present an imagery which makes light of aesthetic codes, viewed as typically western artifices which rupture the connections between man, nature, and the elements. It is no surprise, then, to find that Taaffe's work refers to sources as diverse as abstract expressionism and Pop Art, Duchamp and Rauschenberg, and popular and tribal traditions. Through the arabesque, the spiral and other such eternal motifs, his painting renews our connection with one of the primary and most vertiginous dimensions of art.