Outstanding, thought-provoking body of work by Henry Taylor @ ART BASEL Unlimited 2024, Hauser & Wirth ヘンリー・テイラー @ アート・バーゼル・アンリミテッド 2024

One of the highlights at ART BASEL 2024 happened to be Henry Taylor’s installation in the Unlimited section. Impressive, awe-inspiring, thought-provoking with a current reference. “Untitled” by Taylor from 2022, worth 2.5 million US dollars, had been carefully transported from the USA to Switzerland.

We have Hauser & Wirth Gallery to thank for this realisation at Unlimited. For each ART BASEL 2024 visitor, it was an intellectually stimulating and visual enrichment, a cognitive, ratiocinative impetus, a welcomed oxymoron parallax to the general comfort zone in the art world.

Throughout his four-decade long career, Taylor has consistently and simultaneously embraced and rejected the tenets of traditional painting, as well as any formal label. Combining figurative, landscape and history painting, alongside drawing, installation and sculpture, Taylor’s vast body of highly personal work is rooted in the people and communities closest to him, often manifested together with poignant historical or pop-culture references. Rough-shod and direct, colorful and energetic, the artist’s compositions move from depictions of everyday life to meditative tomes, moments of surreal urban juxtaposition and expressive, occasionally somber moments.

In 1944, Taylor’s parents moved from East Texas to California leaving the segregated South searching for better economic conditions for themselves. Taylor – the youngest of eight children, who often referred to himself as Taylor the Eight – captures memories of his large extended family after the World War II during the Great Migration, and reflects on their experiences, as well as experiences affecting Black Americans nowadays.
The artist often delves into political and social allegory and current events. Unlimited at ART BASEL showed Taylor’s powerful site-specific installation of mannequins in leather jackets, each adorned with pins depicting photographs of Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor and other Black people killed by police in recent years.

“Untitled” refers to The Black Panther Party, especially Taylor’s brother, who was a member of this organisation in California. Additionally, the left-side wall includes a display of 15 photographs of the recent victims of police brutality. Their names:
Antwon Rose Jr. (2000–2018)
Dominique Clayton (1987–2019)
Michael Brown (1996–2014)
Botham Jean (1991–2018)
Christian Taylor (1995–2015)
Walter Scott (1965–2015)
Elijah McClain (1996–2019)
Breonna Taylor (1993–2020)
Tamir Rice (2002–2014)
Freddie Gray (1989–2015)
Jordan Edwards (2001–2017)
Amadou Diallo (1976–1999)
Sean Bell (1983–2006)
Alton Sterling (1979–2016)
Philando Castile (1983–2016)

Above the coats hangs a banner reading “END WAR AND RACISM!!! Support The Black Panthers”. Older brother Randy existed as a role model to Taylor, who instilled in the artist a deference to political activism and art. ‘He made us all more politically conscious. And I read everything he read – including Native American activists like Russell Means and Leonard Peltier – because I wanted to be just like him.’
Featuring contemporary clothing, such as Colin Kaepernick’s San Francisco 49ers jersey, Taylor demonstrates how the fight for equality and peace continues.

Basel, June 2024
Mario A

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Check also:

Art in America, March 2017

“Black Artist” vs. “Yellow Artist” in the context of “Henry Taylor @ Blum & Poe Tokyo”
https://art-culture.world/articles/black-artist-vs-yellow-artist-in-the-context-of-henry-taylor-blum-poe-tokyo/