Craig Taylor
On View: May 15th - June 19th, 2010
Opening Reception: May 15th, 6 - 8 pm
LaMontagne Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Craig Taylor.
In Taylor’s abstractions, he creates paintings that are both direct and nuanced, developing a tension displayed through the simultaneous use of luminous color and graphic structural devices. The images that emerge are corporeal, airy, concrete, moody, lurid, aggressive and delicate. The exchange of these qualities places Taylor’s work in dialogue with gestural abstraction and the use of the grotesque in Surrealism. The contradictions that occur both internally within each painting as well as from one to the next generate layers of meaning through the formal interplay of paint and image. Representation in these paintings unfolds in a fragmentary and unfixed relationship, with subject matter appearing, dissolving and reemerging into a broader meditation on the nature of abstraction and the painted object.
Craig Taylor was born in Baraboo, Wisconsin in 1971 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received his BFA from Maine College of Art and his MFA from Yale University. He has had single artist exhibitions at March Gallery, New York and Test: Showroom, Berlin. He has also been included in numerous group exhibitions. Some recent highlights include shows at CTRL Gallery, Houston, Texas; 106 Greene, Brooklyn, New York; Bakalar and Paine Galleries, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, and Fred [London], Leipzig. He is a professor of Painting at Massachusetts College of Art.