Philip Taaffe

(American, born 1955)

Philip Taaffe is a contemporary American artist best known for his process-based abstractions. Melding iconography, design, art-historical motifs, and personal experience, he creates densely patterned works. “Taaffe’s paintings are built in complex layers, both technical and historical. The more one knows about his process, the more stupefying are the final results,” the poet Vincent Katz said of his work. “Each painting is an amalgam of different techniques and media—oil paint transferred from cardboard forms, acrylic stains, oil-based prints from linoleum blocks, scraping, scouring, photo-based silkscreen prints, collaged paper elements, and most recently, spooned acrylic swirls, and intricately cut and applied sheets of gold leaf.” Taaffe's practice revolves around the appropriation of works both by well-known artists, including Barnett Newman and Bridget Riley, and designs by anonymous artisans. Born in 1955 in Elizabeth, NJ, he studied at the Cooper Union, receiving his BFA in 1977. The artist’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions worldwide, including at Luhring Augustine in Brooklyn, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, and numerous others. Taaffe currently lives and works between New York, NY and West Cornwall, CT. His works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Reina Sofia in Madrid.