Philip Taaffe

Philip Taaffe - The goal is a synthesis of all visual streams of art

Philip Taaffe was born in 1955 in the city of Elizabeth in the US state of New Jersey. In the 1970s, he studied at Cooper Union, where he met the German-born conceptual artist Hans Haacke as a teacher, and held his first solo exhibition as early as 1982. In search of stimulation and inspiration, Philip Taaffe travelled extensively early on, to the Middle East, India, South America and Morocco. He worked with the Moroccan writer Mohamed Mrabet on the book Chocolate Creams and Dollars, which appeared on the American market in 1993 in a translation by Paul Bowles. During his travels, Taaffe developed a pronounced passion for the ornamentation and language of form of not only oriental, but also Asian and Celtic art. For Taaffe, art is about creating a synthesis of all visual forces and elements, not about breaking them up, as is usually the case in modern art.

Diverse influences and motifs are transformed into a new unity

Philip Taaffe lived in Naples from 1988 to 1991 and continually added new elements to his range of motifs, which he drew from the fields of natural science, architectural history and ethnic art. He reorganises and re-layers his originals according to his own sensibilities and lends them a characteristic vibrancy with bright colours. Time and again, Taaffe proves to be a mediator between the different cultures that he has come to know very well on his study trips. As an artist, he is influenced by certain colleagues such as Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg, but is also orientated towards trends such as Optical Art of the 1960s and Appropriation Art of the 1980s. At the end of the day, however, Taaffe is once again able to set himself apart from previous art, albeit not by drawing sharp boundaries, but by consciously building bridges. 

Fascinating pictorial language of patterns, colours and animals

Philip Taaffe has shown his work in numerous exhibitions, including in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Gagosian Art Gallery in Athens and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and a retrospective of his creative period from 1980 to 2008 took place at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg under the programmatic title The Life of Forms. While at first glance Taaffe seems to decipher the ancient symbols and ornaments and translate them into a clear comprehensibility, at second glance a new ambiguity becomes clear, prompting reflection on what the artist actually wants to say with his intricate composition of forms. One of Philip Taaffe's frequently recurring symbols is the beetle, which appears as an ornament in various versions and is sometimes designed by the artist as an independent sticker and subsequently applied to his paintings.

Philip Taaffe lives and works in New York.