AL Taylor
München: Can Studies
26.04. – 07.05.2009

The Kunstverein Bremerhaven is presenting the works of the American artist Al Taylor, born in 1948 in Springfield, Missouri. The artist studied at the Kansas City Art Institute. In 1970 he moved to New York, where he lived and worked until his death in 1999. His works can be found in well-known collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Centre national d`art et culture Georges Pompidou, Paris, and the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich.

Al Taylor’s fragile structures made from everyday materials such as wire, tin cans and wood are on display at the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven. Leaned against the wall or braced with wire, the works develop an interplay of line and volume, visibility and invisibility, light and shadow. The expansive wire tensions of the installations and the rough materials contrast with the lightness of the appearance. His objects do not have geometric precision, but rather the looseness of hand drawing.

In the mid-1980s, AL Taylor began making drawings and objects, for which he drew inspiration from observations of everything that surrounded him. When creating his installations, the artist placed particular emphasis on the shadow lines that the works cast on the wall, which for him were a constitutive part of the work. This shows particularly impressively that Al Taylor saw himself first and foremost as a painter and draftsman, not as a sculptor. The works do not address mass and volume, the classic content of sculpture, but line and space, questions that are more closely linked to drawing. In his works, Al Taylor explored the possibilities of the visual by working both two-dimensionally in drawings and by translating his ideas into the third dimension. Taylor’s works on paper are by no means just sketches or preliminary studies, but represent independent works that were created alternately with installations. “For me, it’s really the same thing to work on paper or on three-dimensional pieces; it’s all an activity and I have no interest in separating it,” explained Al Taylor in 1992. Accordingly, he understood his objects as “drawings in space.”

The works presented in the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven are installations that were created during the artist’s stay there in 1994 for a solo exhibition at the Galerie Fred Jahn in Munich. The works have not been shown publicly since then.

A selection of the artist’s graphics from 1991 and 1997, published by Niels Borch Jensen in Copenhagen, will also be on display.

Julia Schleiss

Curated by Jürgen Wesseler.