Ross Taylor
Summum, 2024
synthetic polymer on canvas
78 3/4 x 59 in. (200 x 150 cm.)

Ross Taylor: A knowing History

September 10-October 9, 2024

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Alexander Berggruen is pleased to present Ross Taylor: A knowing History. This exhibition will open Tuesday, September 10, 2024 with a 5-7 pm reception at the gallery (1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3, New York, NY). This is the artist’s first solo show with the gallery.

Ross Taylor’s kaleidoscopic landscape paintings depict a vivid undulating world shaped by the artist’s memories, psychology, and spirituality. The British artist lives and works in the Macedon Ranges in Australia, where for him, the natural world is an invitation for play. Building on the theatrical qualities of historical landscape painting, Taylor applies light, color, and form to surreally dramatize hills, trees, streams, rocks, and flowers. He mines the fringes of his memories, finding the failings and inconsistencies to be entryways to psychologically and spiritually charging the landscape.

Rolling rocks, hills, mountains, and waterways are delineated with hard edges but filled with a fluid and varied paint application. Texture emerges in Taylor’s paintings from canvas stained with acrylic inks, washes of color mixed with pastel ground, an airbrush, and short, thin brushstrokes. His energetic approach to applying paint imbues the landscape with movement, as the skies are striated or bubbling with clouds, and mountains thrust upwards and plunge downward with dreamlike colors as topographical markings. Even the more gentle scenes generate movement. Take Berceuse, for instance, whose title implies a lullaby. Desert sands roll in the distance, as if slowly kneading the wide open plain in the center, rocking it to rest.

For Taylor, the constraints and failures arising from the decay of memory are not a limiting factor, but are instead a generative one. His paintings chart changes in the land that oscillate between reality and memory-induced fiction. Walking the same path every morning, the artist gains intimate awareness of how the land responds to each season through its subtle and dramatic interactions with light. From this foundation, he embraces the art of dramatic storytelling, inspired by Romantic landscape painters such as Casper David Friedrich, J.M.W. Turner, and Thomas Cole. Yet, where Taylor boldly gives voice to the land’s character, he fills in the gaps in his memory with volatile, vibrant color and texture.

The exhibition’s title A knowing History is borrowed from Brett Levine’s essay on Taylor’s work for the group show When woods we pass at Scott Miller Projects. It recalls his familiarity with the forests near his home and his humble contemplations about the “knowledge construction” in his paintings, as they are “formed on the fragile foundations of recollection,” in the artist’s words.

Taylor depicts the unfolding of landforms’ metamorphoses with psychedelic colors, unstable perspectives, and collage-like elements. Through a technique he calls “stitching,” Taylor collages multiple perspectives of a scene, fusing certain elements and allowing others to abruptly halt, to form a new but familiar place. In his stitched paintings—such as Summum and The turning year—vertical lines mark the interference of time into space. Here, the landscape glitches. Waterways flow, dry up, and change color. Land masses emerge and are destroyed in an instant.

Taylor’s paintings resist categorization, as they could exist within a variety of timescales and locations. Across deserts, mountains, plains, rivers, waterfalls, and caves, each landscape is devoid of any clear human presence. Yet, even absent markers of humanity, Taylor makes visible the unseen interstitial elements of time, psychology, and spirituality. Surrealism enables Taylor’s paintings to illuminate, in his words: “the spirit of nature existing in the outside of the periphery, shifting around and behind us as we move through it.” He unveils the self that exists within the landscape, as through thought, we project ourselves onto the world around us, using our experience of our environment to understand where we are, and who we are. His psychological landscapes thus reflect the serenity and pathos of the human condition.

Press release by Kirsten Cave.

Ross Taylor in the studio, Macedon Ranges, Victoria, AU, 2024.

About the Artist

Ross Taylor (b. 1982, Northumberland, UK) received a BA in fine art at University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK and also studied at Academie De Bildenden Kunste in Munich, DE. Taylor has been a finalist for Sovereign Asian Art Prize, Lyn McCrea Drawing Prize, Perimeter Book Prize, Paul Guest Prize, and Sunshine Coast Prize, among other accolades. He has held residencies at What’s Missing? Initiatives; Globe Gallery; North Shields, England; and Art Space Tetra, Fukuoka, Japan. His work has been exhibited internationally including at: Alexander Berggruen, New York, NY; Scott Miller Projects, Birmingham, AL; BEERS London, UK; Villazan, Madrid, ES; Latrobe Art Institute, Bendigo, AU; Institute of New Media, Frankfurt, GE; Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne, AU; Bendigo Art Gallery, Bendigo, AU; SADE Los Angeles, CA; Aga Khan, London, UK; and Caloundra Regional Gallery, Queensland, AU. Taylor’s work is held in the public collections of Bendigo Art Gallery, Bendigo, AU; Ballarat Art Gallery, Ballarat Central, AU; and Horsham Art Gallery, Vic, AU. The artist lives and works in the Macedon Ranges, Victoria, AU.

This is Taylor’s first solo show with the gallery, following his inclusion in the gallery’s group show The Natural World: Part II (March 9-April 13, 2022), and in the gallery’s presentation at The Dallas Art Fair (April 20-23, 2023).

Ross Taylor: A knowing History will run at Alexander Berggruen (1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3) from September 10-October 9, 2024. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery at info@alexanderberggruen.com.

Press

Color Theory: Artist Anna Kunz Uses the Power of Pigment to Spark Emotion

LUXE INTERIORS + DESIGN

For Chicago-based painter Anna Kunz, color never sits still. “In a composition, it moves and vibrates,” she says. “It’s alive and engaging—the opposite of static.”

The artist, whose aesthetic forebears include such people as Robert Irwin and Josef Albers, learned about color’s emotive powers early in life. Her father worked at the Art Institute of Chicago, where a young Kunz often waited for him while parked in front of Mark Rothko’s shimmering Untitled (Purple, White, and Red). “I observed how some people laughed, some got angry and others wept,” she recalls. “At 7 years old, I didn’t know color would be my lifelong pursuit—but I saw its potential to evoke a response.”

Today, Kunz—who divides her studio time between the Austin neighborhood and rural Michigan—is known for making viewers rethink the hues they take for granted with works on paper, canvas and textiles. “I enjoy fairly simple geometric forms because I am interested in pigments being perceived first,” she says, noting that color can affect everything from our heartbeats to our circulatory systems. She also explores how the perception of a particular hue depends on its surroundings. “Albers put it perfectly,” says Kunz, paraphrasing the 20th-century German American artist: “No one color is true—it is only determined by its relation to another color.”

In Kunz’s Austin studio, smaller works on paper are arrayed on countertops while larger canvases are spread on the floor. She moves between them via wooden planks in a kind of dance, painting to the sounds of experimental music. “My process is generative—I consider everything as part of a continuum,” says Kunz, who applies oils with a brush and acrylics with objects plucked from the domestic realm—spatulas, hairbrushes, bits of fabric, curlers—as well as found items, like leaves. “And I use a lot of water, because I like to dissolve hard-edged boundaries,” she adds. Kunz builds a rich depth of color by layering multiple thin films of pigment. She works with only a couple of different hues in a given day, assigning each one its own specific task: “For example, I might want my red to feel submissive in one piece and more dominant in another,” the artist explains. “I use colors like characters to satisfy different formal problems.”

Kunz, who has an upcoming solo show at New York’s Alexander Berggruen gallery in May and a group show at Detroit’s Library Street Collective in July, knows a painting is finished when it starts to take on a life of its own and feels unexpected—“like a surprise,” she describes. “When I sense light emitting from the color, I feel I’ve created a kind of optimism, and that’s when it’s time to leave it alone.”

Publications

Ross Taylor: Selected Works

Ross Taylor: Selected Works was published on the occasion of the gallery’s exhibition Ross Taylor: A knowing History, which will run from September 10-October 9, 2024. This catalogue features an essay by Curator of Australian Art at National Gallery of Australia Rebecca Edwards and an interview between Ross Taylor and artist Laurie Nye, which took place in 2024.

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