Al Taylor: Prints

The delicate Postminimalist sculptures and drawings of the American artist Al Taylor (1948-1999) were for a long time better known in Europe than in the U.S., despite Taylor’s residing in New York. Laboring quietly from the mid-1980s until his premature death from cancer at the age of 51, Taylor made abstract drawings and sculptures derived from found materials that refresh both abstraction and Postminimalism with their gentle humor and lightness of touch. Working in a decade that favored less discreet gestures, Taylor never loomed large in the New York art world’s consciousness (despite his brief tenure as a studio assistant to Robert Rauschenberg). Alongside an increasing number of exhibitions, this publication helps to remedy that oversight, providing a catalogue raisonné of Taylor’s graphic works, thereby retrieving a previously little-known aspect of his oeuvre. Aside from the published prints, it also reproduces all of the artist’s proofs and variants, which often differ significantly from the final versions.