Henry Taylor: New Etchings

January 1, 2025- March 11, 2025

When Henry Taylor arrived at the Paulson Fontaine Press studio earlier this year, he was met with much anticipation. It had been five years since I stood in front of Taylor’s work at the Venice Biennale in 2019. I was at the Arsenale, transfixed by a large triptych measuring about 7 x19 feet. The first panel was a portrait of Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the Haitian Revolution. The second was a painted replica of the artist Glenn Ligon’s text painting titled, “Remember the Revolution #1”, 2004 from his series dedicated to Richard Pryor’s stand-up routines. And lastly, was a painting based on a photograph of mourners at the funeral for Carol Robertson, a victim of the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama.

This piece perfectly encapsulated Taylor’s breadth of view, showcasing his deep concern with American and art history, the universal grappling with mourning and loss, and the dark humor developed to cope with these human experiences and conditions.

In 2020, we began a discussion about making prints together, and since then, the momentum of Henry Taylor: B Side has taken the world by storm. Henry Taylor: B Side is the largest exhibition of Taylor’s work to date and it traveled from MOCA, Los Angeles to The Whitney Museum in New York, surveying thirty years of his work in painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation.

Fast forward to 2024. When Taylor first arrived at the press, he began experimenting with sugarlift by painting portraits of our team and it was a beautiful icebreaker. In the words of Alicia Keys, “When Henry walks into a room, he lights up the whole space.” With the energy you might expect from viewing his style of mark making, he experimented with soapground, spitbite, softground, and drypoint. Ultimately, it was the immediacy of the positive mark provided by sugarlift that Taylor ran with. Over the course of the next week, he created a self-portrait, revisited a painting of his late mother and his daughter, and started a piece based on a photo he had taken years ago of a group of men on the streets of downtown L.A. In the print titled History is Everywhere, Taylor pays tribute to Huey P. Newton and the city of Oakland where he took his first printmaking class at Laney college in the late 70’s.

One day in the studio, after a conversation at lunch about the state of the world, Henry asked if we had a plunger and proceeded to paint it with the words, “It about to Go Down.” During a second visit to the studio in August, inspired by painter Max Beckmann, he rendered a gorgeous still life of a bouquet of roses we had placed in the studio on his behalf. It’s this voracious vacillation that makes his work so exciting and compelling.

The writer Zadie Smith wrote about Taylor, “If it has been the tendency of African-American artists to stray heedlessly over academic borders and genre demarcations (rap is popular poetry; jazz produces improvised symphonies; gospel is the sexual sacred), then Taylor is firmly grounded in the African-American aesthetic tradition. His greatest subject is human personality, although in his portraits, personality is not a matter of literal representation but rather a vibe, a texture, a series of vertical block colors laid out on a horizontal plane. This restates the obvious fact that seeing is never objective, but the intense level of empathy we meet with in Taylor’s portraits, especially between the artist and his African-American subjects, determines everything we see from brushstroke to framing to gaze.”

Henry Taylor is one of the most significant artists of his generation, and we are honored to publish ten new editions introducing his first major print project.

-Rhea Fontaine