CALIFORNIA
Timothy Taylor is pleased to announce California, a group exhibition featuring new work by multigenerational artists with deep connections to the American West Coast.
January 23 - March 8, 2025
As the precarious balance of nature and culture—so central to the state’s cultural identity—shifts with frightening speed, these themes become even more poignant and powerful. The 1960s saw radical developments in West Coast art. Invigorated by the region’s spaciousness, light, auto industries, and Hollywood—and encouraged by the state’s storied art schools and alternative exhibition spaces—artists experimented with materiality and strategies of display. In Los Angeles, the Light and Space movement emerged, as did a form of Southern Californian Minimalism known as Finish Fetish. There were major explorations of found-object assemblage and mosaic in South Central’s fertile art scene, while in Northern California, the Funk and Nut movements embraced figuration, humour, and satire in mixed-media and ceramic works. Across these scenes, the social and natural environments of the West Coast impacted artists’s perception and creativity alike.
The six artists featured in California variously engage materials and processes in ways that reflect these vibrant histories. Each has an indelible relationship to the region—most were born there and all now live there. Paintings by Hilary Pecis, June Edmonds, Sara Issakharian, and Hugo McCloud appear alongside a ceramic sculpture by Ruby Neri and neon and mosaic works by Patrick Martinez.
The Light and Space artists (including Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Larry Bell, and Mary Corse) also famously employed neon or other alternative, sometimes mundane materials in their mission to explore sensory phenomena and perception. Such material experimentation runs through the works in California.
Collectively, the works in California reveal the ways in which today’s artists pay homage to, elaborate, and depart from the region’s defining art and cultural histories through innovative approaches to material and sensitive engagements with radiant colour.