Philip Taaffe [Hardcover]

This book presents a comprehensive view of the work of American painter Philip Taaffe (b.1955), who has expanded the parameters of painting through his use of silkscreen, linocuts, collage, stencils, gouache, chine-coll?, marbling, acrylic, enamel, watercolour and gold leaf. Possessing many technical skills, Taaffe has moved decisively between unique pictorial inventions and appropriations, as well as overlaying divergent modes of representation, through cultural patterns found in ornament, and biomorphic abstraction.

John Yau's insightful text is the first to look at every part of Taaffe's artistic development, from the works he made at Cooper Union while a student of Hans Haacke, to the present. It pays special attention to Taaffe's acquisition of different techniques, as well as investigating his various sources of inspiration, which include the work of experimental filmmakers Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner and Harry Smith, the Natural History illustrations of Ernst Haeckel, and the ancient art of paper marbling.

The first illustrated monograph to survey the work to date of major American painter Philip Taaffe (b.1955), whose work has expanded the parameters of painting through a fascinating layering of different techniques and imagery, including marbling, silkscreen, collage and linocut.John Yau is an award-winning poet, art critic and curator who has published many books of poetry, fiction and art criticism. He is the author of a volume on American painter Thomas Nozkowski for the Lund Humphries Contemporary Painters Series.Foreword, Barry Schwabsky; Introduction; The Rise of Conceptual Art, 19721977; 2 Early Works, 19771985; 3 In Naples, Across from Vesuvius, 19861991; 4 An ló1