Philip Taaffe
Philip Taaffe was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1955, and studied at the Cooper Union in New York. He has been included in numerous museum exhibitions, including the Carnegie International, two Sydney Biennials, and three Whitney Biennials. Taaffe’s work is in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.
I suppose I have never really thought of myself as being a contemporary artist. I’ve considered myself as coming from some ancient place and then managing to arrive in the present. I think I may have learned this from Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly, and Brice Marden—artists who always seemed to transcend their own cultural reality, and yet they gave us the tools we needed to contend with our own today.
