This survey exhibition of Rodney Taylor’s paintings from the mid-1990s to the present day explores how the artist employs abstraction and metaphor to convey the experience of contemporary urban life and societal trauma. Produced through a dense combination of muted and lurid pigments mixed with clay, Taylor’s peeling and cracking surfaces are like human skin, worn sidewalks, or arid deserts. City streets, windows, crisscrossing tree limbs, or prison bars are frequent structuring elements in his work and he uses these abstracted grids to communicate the contrasting experiences of barriers and movement, as well as the interplay between lived realities and the interior imagination. His canvases and paper drawings are often exposed and vulnerable in places where the support is stained or left completely raw. Collage elements like old drawings or candy bar wrappers, shredded bits of the real world, often become ensnared in his painterly sagas. In the Middle Passage series from the mid-1990s bodies missing a variety of limbs emerge from somewhere deep inside the canvas. Drawn lines of tumbling comic book characters and other figurative elements tag the surface in his Hero series, sharing space with large amorphous forms that coalesce into human heads and reclining figures before they lose their tenuous grasp on figuration and recede back into an all-consuming abstraction.
Buffalo-based painter Rodney Taylor has exhibited internationally. His work is in gallery, private, and museum collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the collection of Bill and Camille Cosby. Educated at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York, Taylor was awarded the Camille Cosby Fellowship, and then attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He was a Milton Avery School of the Arts Fellow at Bard College.
The UB Art Gallery is funded by the UB College of Arts and Sciences, the Visual Arts Building Fund, and the Seymour H. Knox Foundation Fine Arts Fund.