Honor Titus, Sock Hop, 2020

Honor Titus (b. 1989, Brooklyn, NY) is an American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles.

Depicting gracefully elongated, soigné subjects dancing, playing tennis, and engaging in other leisurely pursuits, Titus’s paintings nod to the refined portraiture of American predecessors like Fairfield Porter and Alex Katz who, along with Edward Hopper and the Chicago Imagists, considered the aesthetics of advertising and modern urban life. Titus is celebrated for the sensitivity with which he renders his subjects, capturing them in self-contained moments of solitary reflection and intimacy. In its reimagining of what a portrait might look like and do, his practice is informed by those of the nineteenth-century French Symbolist group Les Nabis, recalling Maurice Denis and Félix Vallatton's deployment of stylized patterning and decorative elements. Titus’s paintings place his figures against semi-abstracted, color-blocked compositions that locate them as the centers of their own private worlds. Crucially, the artist's depictions populate these scenes of ritualized opulence with people of colour, challenging viewers to reconsider their erasure from narratives of elite culture.

In June 2023, Titus was among ten internationally acclaimed artists commissioned by His Majesty King Charles III to contribute portraits honouring pioneering members of Britain’s Windrush Generation, which were on view at the National Portrait Gallery until April 2024. The unveiling of the artist’s portrait followed closely on the heels of his first monograph featuring texts by writers Durga Chew-Bose and Klaus Ottmann as well as artist Henry Taylor who mentored Titus following his relocation to Los Angeles and later gave him his first solo exhibition. In autumn of this same year, the Longlati Foundation presented Ornamental Distance, Titus's first institutional solo presentation which doubled as the artist's first-ever exhibition in Asia.

Timothy Taylor is delighted to present For Heaven’s Sake, the first solo New York exhibition of paintings by self-taught American artist Honor Titus (b. 1989, Brooklyn, NY).

Titus paints vibrant scenes that are simultaneously journalistic and utopic, depicting leisure activities from his lived experience and memories. The works are infused with joy and wistfulness, evoking remembrances of better times and the romance of everyday life. He creates “fragmented street scenes” that reflect a range of influences, including the visual language of jazz music, memory, literature, comics, architecture, advertisement, and 19th-century French art. The isolation and allure of the cities where he has lived and spent time—New York City, London, Paris, and now Los Angeles—are recurring motifs. Titus feels a particular affinity with Les Nabis—the group of young artists in fin de siècle Paris that included Edouard Vuillard, Félix Vallotton, and Pierre Bonnard—both for their formal language and their conceptual philosophy.