Timothy Taylor: 30 Years

Timothy Taylor is pleased to celebrate 30 Years, an exhibition marking three decades of the gallery’s programme and its relationships with artists. On view from 23 April through 30 May in London, this landmark presentation brings together new, recent, and historic works by current and represented artists, alongside paintings by significant twentieth-century figures whose work Timothy Taylor has consistently championed over the past three decades. Together, these works capture the gallery’s heartbeat, grounded in historical resonance and informed by new perspectives.

Our thirtieth anniversary offers an opportunity to reflect on the consistency, depth, and curiosity that have shaped the gallery’s programme, and to acknowledge the artists who have defined it. From the beginning, we have celebrated painters, often following their exploration of other media. Foundational to this programme are works by Sean Scully, Jonathan Lasker, Philip Guston, Alex Katz, Kiki Smith, Simon Hantaï, and Antoni Tàpies, whose paintings and, in many cases, expanded work in mediums like sculpture or printmaking have been at the core of the gallery’s identity.

The gallery’s very first exhibition, in January 1997, was new work by Sean Scully, marking the beginning of a decades-long collaboration that encompassed ten solo exhibitions. For our anniversary presentation, Scully has created a new square 70 x 70 cm painting on copper that exemplifies his ongoing exploration of a pared-back vocabulary of motifs; across his compositions, subtly modulating blocks of densely layered colour are arranged in allover configurations. 

Jonathan Lasker has likewise been central to the gallery since its earliest years, his compositions bringing a vital energy to its sustained engagement with painting. Here, he pays tribute to that moment with a 1997 painting teeming with his signature imagery of stylized gestures and graphemes, crisp colour, and formal play.

We presented Philip Guston’s works on paper in 1999 and have since organized six solo exhibitions of his work. Untitled (Red Eyes) (1968–69), featured here, was a central painting in our 2015 exhibition of works dated 1969–1980, many of which had never been exhibited in Europe. These striking works resulted from Guston’s infamous return to figuration in 1968 following a twenty-year period of abstraction.

In 2002, we mounted Alex Katz’s first commercial exhibition in the UK and have since organized fourteen solo presentations of his paintings, often centring on the ninety-eight-year-old artist’s remarkable observation of the natural world (as in his current solo exhibition Various Trees, up through 11 April). Here, his large-scale painting Two Trees (2015) pictures a fleeting impression of parallel trees before a pastoral scene, their limbs entangled and leaves swept up in a breeze.

We have also been working with Kiki Smith for twenty years. Her bronze Chandelier, Moth & Star (2006), on view, was in Timothy Taylor’s debut exhibition of her work that same year. The sculpture dimly lit the mythical installation, which explored the nuanced relationship of female sexuality and the natural world.

We have been fortunate to collaborate with the estates of Simon Hantaï and Antoni Tàpies for more than a decade. In 2024, our exhibition showcasing rare works by Hantaï, curated by Molly Warnock, was widely acclaimed and celebrated by the family. His 1981 painting Tabula (1981) demonstrates the artist’s unique pliage technique, which involves painting folded, knotted, or crumpled canvas before unfolding and stretching it for exhibition. In this brilliant example, passages of orange and black are fragmented by zones of unpainted canvas, troubling the relationship of figure and ground.

Following Tàpies’s death in 2012, the gallery began working more closely with those stewarding the artist’s legacy, building on Timothy Taylor’s longstanding relationship with the artist after a 1991 meeting. We have since organised three solo presentations of the artist’s work in London. Paper vertical II 1999 T-7951 (1999), created toward the end of the artist’s seven-decade career, foregrounds Tàpies’s experimentation with the fluidity between material and form, language and idea, symbol and abstraction.

These works offer a portrait of the gallery’s bedrock and will stand alongside new and recent works by primary artists Alicia Adamerovich, Marina Adams, Daniel Crews-Chubb, Armen Eloyan, Paul Jenkins, Sean Landers, Sahara Longe, Chris Martin, Eddie Martinez, Annie Morris, Richard Patterson, Hilary Pecis, Michel Pérez Pollo, Jiab Prachakul, Paul Anthony Smith, Honor Titus, Alice Tippit, Martha Tuttle, and Ding Yi as well as a historic work by Eduardo Terrazas. Together, these voices form an intergenerational dialogue that speaks to the gallery’s ongoing commitment to its artists—from those who laid our foundation, to those who remain vital touchstones today, on to those whose work will shape the decades ahead.