Bio

Imogen Taylor is currently based in London. She graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts in 2010 with a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Arts (Honours). In the last decade she has been the recipient of important awards and residencies, including the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship (2019) and the McCahon House artist residency (2017). In 2018 Taylor was named the Paramount Award winner of the Wallace Art Awards, providing her with a six-month residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York.

Her richly painted canvases oscillate between semi-figurative mash-ups and pungent, colour-drenched abstract ruminations that sit in a space between proto-cubism and the lush, sexually symbolic approach reminiscent of American modernist icon Georgia O’Keefe.

Taylor’s paintings boundary-ride between accepted forms from the canon of abstract theory and practice, whilst frequently colliding these with their conceptual opposites – for example cubism softened by fauvism. Much has been made of her queer reading of art history and her frequently sensuous, even explicit scenes.

Shooting Blanks (2020) is a work that interrogates her reading of art history, and has been described as ‘witty and subversive … a point of view hovering between authenticity and irony.’

The first clue is the diagonally aligned canvas, which sets up a play on verticality with the ‘chimney’ block forms that animate the composition. It is a play on the deliberate ‘unseeing’ of cubism, which seeks to crystallise multiple viewpoints of ‘cubic’ volume onto the flat surface of the canvas. At the same time she is alluding to the long tail of cubist legacy in Aotearoa New Zealand, as Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki curator Julia Waite identified when discussing Taylor’s work. ‘Despite the negative perceptions to do with cultural lag, Louise Henderson and Colin McCahon’s sustained commitment to cubism during the 1950s represents an important moment of transition in New Zealand painting … Their newly faceted painting radiated with a tension, as old and new geometric frameworks subordinated natural form … More than fifty years later, cubism re-emerged in Auckland in the work of Imogen Taylor. Though her painting finds its energy from the same spring as her mid-century ancestors, she is arguably in closer dialogue with the later translations than the original texts.

Exhibitions

• 2024   Northart, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland: Abstraxt Abstraxt
• 2023   Michael Lett, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland: Murmurs
• 2022   Whangārei Art Museum: Quiet Motel
• 2020   Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hākena, Ōtepoti Dunedin: Sapphic Fragments
• 2021   Michael Lett, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland: Thirsty Work
• 2018   The Dowse Art Museum, Te Awa Kairangi ki Tai Lower Hutt: Social Studies
• 2015   Artspace Aotearoa, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland: Body Language