Philip Taaffe

Philip Taaffe ( born 1955 in Elizabeth, New Jersey) is an American painter.

Life

Taaffe began his artistic training mid-1970s at the Cooper Union in New York the artist Hans Haacke and had his first solo exhibition in 1982 in New York. He traveled through the Middle East, India, Morocco, Japan and South America and lived from 1988-91 in Naples. Taaffe lives in New York.

Work

Philip Taaffe became known in the early 1980s with the international movement of appropriation art. He first went out of the tradition of abstract painting in the 20th century and joined his conception of abstract art with studies on the ornament. Through an extended stay in Naples and travel through North Africa, the Middle East, India, South America, Japan, developed his enthusiasm for the ornaments and abstraction techniques from different cultures who serve him to this day as a repository for his work. Since the mid-1990s Taaffe expanded its sources are natural representations which are mainly from historical books and scientific treatises. By his own admission Taaffe, the artist is " always looking for representatives that are so typical of their kind that they almost exist as abstract elements (...). " Varies processed and be subject vocabulary in which he shapes, symbols and ornaments brings to the canvas and thus in a new context in new and surprising constellations as fragments and in bright colors. His work is represented in museums and collections in New York, Vienna, Rome, Hamburg, Berlin. The first major retrospective of his work from 1980 to 2008 with the title " The Life of Forms " was held in 2008 at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.