Hong Kong Basel Showcases Painter Imogen Taylor

This year, Art Basel in Hong Kong featured 242 galleries from 35 countries and territories, with a booth set up by Auckland gallerist Michael Lett featuring Whangarei-born painter Imogen Taylor. According to American online art platform Artsy, the Lett booth was one of the highlights of the show.

Taylor paints on slanted canvases – parallelograms that reinforce her ideas about reconsidering art history from an alternative angle. Her bold hues and merging picture planes evoke Cubism and Constructivism, but with warmth and a distinct personal touch. Taylor paints on rough hessian (burlap), embracing her surfaces’ inconsistencies (nubs of fabric, loose strings).

“She talks about queer formalism,” Lett said. “As a gay artist, she is interested in the intersectionality of her own life and bringing all these threads together.” According to Lett, Taylor’s process has involved going on pilgrimages to see an artist’s work, bringing that information back home, and filtering it through her own experience, as part of a larger tradition of New Zealand women artists – many of whom have been long overlooked (Lett mentioned Rita Angus and Frances Hodgkins as examples).

Taylor was born in 1985. She graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts in 2010 and lives and works in Auckland.

Original article by Alina Cohen, Artsy, March 27, 2019.

Image Source: Art Basel; Imogen Taylor, Sapphic Fragments, 2019, Courtesy of the artist and Michael Lett, Auckland