Philip Taaffe, After Alcyonaria I, 2011. Mixed media on canvas mounted on panel, 30 7/8 x 40 3/4 inches; 78.4 x 103.5 cm. Photo: Courtesy James Cohan Gallery.
James Cohan Gallery Shanghai presents the exhibition Alchemy & Inquiry with works by three prominent American artists, Philip Taaffe, Fred Tomaselli and Terry Winters. The exhibition was organized by independent curator Raymond Foye and Senior Curator Jennifer McGregor at the Wave Hill botanical garden and cultural center in New York City, where this exhibition first originated and was on view from April to June, 2011.
Nature and the natural world have long inspired artists in both Western and Eastern cultures. While each of the three artists in this exhibition have their own distinctive and innovative approach to their process and materials, they each share a common interest in producing works that become diverse, visually engaged responses to the ways in which they study nature and observe the changing landscape. For Philip Taaffe plant life and botanicals have been a significant and continued source of inspiration for the artist’s work. Through intensive research drawn from the artist’s extensive library of rare books Taaffe takes an accumulative approach to his works, often combining nature-printing techniques, collage, and painting. In the works by Fred Tomaselli there is an encyclopedic interest in popular culture, art history, and the artist’s own engagement with the natural world around him. On view will be paintings and photograms using actual plant material collected from the artist’s own garden in Brooklyn, New York. Throughout his career Terry Winters has explored a wide range of subjects from biological processes, scientific and mathematical fields, the structural underpinnings of nature, technology and the human mind as source material for his paintings, drawings and prints. This exhibition also hallmarks a return to botanical imagery.
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