He may be one of the most celebrated American painters of the day, but Henry Taylor’s first encounter with fine art was seeing the paintings on the walls of the grand homes his mother cleaned for a living. Now, as his inaugural exhibition for Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, the Los Angeles-based artist will take over all five of the gallery’s West Country locations to present a major body of sculptural work and paintings.
Born in 1958, his introduction to paint itself could be attributed to his father, who decorated local bars and houses and who, for a time, worked for the US government as a commercial painter on the naval air station in Ventura, California. Taylor didn’t begin formally studying art until he’d reached his 30s, when he became a student at the California Institute of Fine Arts. During this time, he made ends meet by also working full time as a psychiatric technician at the Camarillo State Mental Hospital, where he made portraits of his schizophrenic and bipolar pa