Philip Taaffe

Earlier this year I posed a question to 12 admired painters: “What is the current state of abstraction?

Earlier this year I posed a question to 12 admired painters: “What is the current state of abstraction?” The following is a collection of their responses, spanning the absurd, the analytical, and the visionary, all linked by an undercurrent of curiosity for the unknown.

“Decoration in this folk sense is a kind of culturalized representation of nature. It’s closest to the raw elements that reflect a very specific geographical location in historical time. The importance of it for me is that I can have these circumstances of time and place in crystalline form, and I can feel those realities, feel the history that they inevitably speak about in this natural cultural sense.”