Henry Taylor: Skin in the Game

One of the many reasons I love PS1 is that it's one of the few museums that regularly introduces an old art addict like me me to talents with whom I'm not familiar. Case in Point: The Henry Taylor show on view now in the main, first-floor exhibition area through April 9.

Henry Taylor, "Huey Newton (2007)

The majority of the show is taken up with mid-sized paintings, mostly portraits and mostly of African-Americans. His subjects include athletes, both living and dead (Carl Lewis, Jackie Robinson); political figures (Huey Newton); his own family; self-portraits; and just plain folk whom he meets on the streets and whose look he likes.

Henry Taylor, "The Long Jump by Carl Lewis" (2010)

The style is faux-naif, with enough post-Modern touches (Carl Lewis is jumping at you, withe a white-picket fence and prison in the background) to make clear this is a trained, art-school grad. With so much black skin on display, I was reminded of something Jeffrey Deitch (former gallerist, now head of LA MoCA) told me in an interview: that no one paints black skin like Kehinde Wiley.

Taylor won't give Wiley (currently the subject of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum) a run for his money on this front, but I enjoyed the work, especially his use of unusual painting surfaces, including cereal boxes; and, in the second-best painting in the show, two side-by-side cigarette packs to form the "canvas" for a mini-self-portrait.

And collectors are certainly eating this up. I'm an avid reader of museum wall text to find out where the work is coming from, And a huge percentage of the Taylor paintings--I'd say north of 90 percent--are in the hands of private collectors. Very few are here "courtesy of the artist" or his gallery.

"Warning Shots Not Required" (rear left)

The best painting in the show? Hands-down: "Warning Shots Not Required," a 23-foot long giant that incorporates all of the motifs that recur in Taylor's work, including horses, prisons and, mysteriously, spaghetti.

"It's Like a Jungle"

But the best piece in the show isn't a painting, but a sculpture: "It's Like a Jungle" greets visitors in the exhibition's first gallery. It's a room-filling, highly vertical installation of brooms, buckets, black-painted jugs and bric-a-brac: a scary/inviting urban forest.

And in fact, PS1 does Taylor what is a huge disservice by emphasizing his painting. An exhibition on view until April 22 at a commercial gallery, Untitled on the Lower East Side, reveals Taylor to be a much more interesting sculptor/installation artist than he is a painter.

Henry Taylor, "March Forth"

The gallery (rapidly establishing itself as one of the best in town; it has been open now a few years and is batting 1.000 in my book--every one of its shows has been stellar) is covered in rich, brown dirt; in the center is an African hut made out of a wide array of scrap materials. It's a stunner.

Henry Taylor, "To Be Titled"

But even better: wall-hanging sculptures made entirely out of the black-painted jugs that make only a cameo appearance at PS1.

These jugs are amazingly evocative of African masks--found objects transformed, with just black paint and the right positioning, into powerful fetish objects. Spectacular.

--Bryant Rousseau