Hauser & Wirth marks its Paris opening with an inaugural Henry Taylor exhibition

Hauser & Wirth opened 15 galleries around the world before finally making its debut in Paris this month, the same weekend that collectors started flooding into town for the second edition of Paris+ par Art Basel.

The gallery took years to open, explains Hauser & Wirth President Marc Payot, because everything had to be just right. “We don’t have satellite galleries. They’re always specific to the actual place. Here it must feel like a French gallery, which is very different from New York or London.”

One major challenge was finding a suitable location, which ended up being a four-storey neoclassical building with arched windows and Corinthian pilasters, steps from the Champs-Elysées. The Paris-based studio Laplace, a frequent collaborator of the gallery, totally reconfigured the interior, which had been divided up as a radio studio. They removed a central staircase, non-structural walls, and a mezzanine, creating six metres of height in the ground-floor gallery.

“We tried to recreate a Parisian space, using Parisian codes,” says Luis Laplace. Rather than concrete, he installed oak flooring in a clean, contemporary version of parquet de Versailles. Simple baseboards and mouldings line the walls and ceilings. In the entrance, the walls are made of local Croix-Huyart limestone.

Laplace also annexed a decrepit spiral stairway that had belonged to the neighbouring building, restoring the wrought iron railing and replacing the old marble steps with wood. British artist Martin Creed painted black parallel stripes on the walls and gold ones on the ceilings, so now the stairwell dazzles.

Two large exhibition rooms are the backdrop for a stunning inaugural show of new works by Los Angeles artist Henry Taylor (who also has a career survey running at the Whitney Museum of American Art). A Southern California native, Taylor received his MFA at the California Institute of the Arts. He opted to create figurative art at a time when it had fallen out of vogue, a choice that held his career back for a long time.

As a young man, Taylor worked for 10 years as a night orderly at a psychiatric hospital, and painted portraits of some of the patients. “These were the most mentally distressed people you can imagine” says New York curator Laura Hoptman, a friend of the artist who had flown to Paris for the Hauser & Wirth opening. She says that Taylor’s deep empathy was undoubtedly shaped by his experience at the hospital.

You can see that humanity in his colourful acrylic paintings, many of the subjects placed eye-to-eye with the viewer. Among them, actor/dancer Ben Vereen sits on a chair at the beach, a stylised Michelle Obama wears black wings, and a nude Josephine Baker kneels in front of the Louvre, the British Museum, and a ship.

A painter of people, Taylor rejects the title of portraitist, and often employs loose, modernist techniques. Hoptman says he has bigger ambitions: to let the viewer know “I’m part of art history…You can be genuine and also be highly, highly, highly cultured.” One work, of four figures reclining on the grass, is a wink to Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Taylor’s sculptures, assemblages of objects such as bleach bottles and floor mops, also contain artistic allusions. A tall, solitary tree with an afro-like crown has actual hair on top, a nod to the artist David Hammons’ use of hair swept up from the floors of African American barbershops.

This is Taylor’s first show in France, where he is still little-known (despite having some of his portraits embroidered on the clothing at Pharrell Williams’ menswear show for Louis Vuitton last spring). He spent two months in Paris this summer, creating more than half the works on display. A portrait of his three-year old daughter appears in the background of a self-portrait painted on his 65 th birthday. He is seated alone, in front of a cake, obviously missing her.

Preferring to avoid the crowds, Taylor made himself scarce during the show’s opening events. But a keen observer might have spotted him strolling the streets of Paris not far from the new gallery. As Marc Payot says, “The importance of this place—besides the obvious of Paris being Paris—is that artists want to be here. Their excitement to be here, and show in this gallery, is more than in any other space we have.”

‘Henry Taylor. From Sugar to Shit’ is on view through Sunday 7 January 2024

hauserwirth.com