Chocolate Creams and Dollars

Philip Taaffe is an American painter and printmaker whose work synthesizes historical abstraction with ornamental and decorative vocabularies drawn from Islamic art, Byzantine mosaics, and modernist geometry. Working primarily in acrylic, collage, and screenprint since the 1980s, he constructs layered compositions that resist the formal austerity of postwar abstraction in favor of sensory richness and pattern. His paintings and prints engage with color saturation and surface complexity as means of historical and material investigation rather than decoration alone.

Elizabeth, NJ, USA