JAMES JARVAISE AND HENRY TAYLOR: SOMETIMES A STRAIGHT LINE HAS TO BE CROOKED
HAUSER & WIRTH presents Sometimes a straight line has to be crooked, the first European exhibition bringing together the work of Henry Taylor in dialogue with that of his teacher, California modernist James Jarvaise (1924 – 2015).
June 12 – September 5, 2026
It is significant that Taylor’s debut at Hauser & Wirth in Zurich takes place in dialogue with Jarvaise—the artist who saw something special in Taylor when he was a student in the 1980s. Concurrently on view, the Musée National Picasso-Paris is presenting the solo exhibition, ‘Henry Taylor. Where thoughts provoke,’ from 8 April – 6 September.
Travelling from Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, the exhibition will feature over seven decades of works that explore the artists’ mutual interest in the figure and landscape. On view will be paintings and drawings from Jarvaise’s Hudson River School series, which was included in the famous 1959 exhibition ‘Sixteen Americans’ at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in which Jay DeFeo, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella also debuted as emerging artists. These historic works will be presented along with modernist collages from the 1950s and figurative paintings from the 1960s that were specifically chosen by Taylor. Encapsulating more than three decades, Taylor’s own work is represented by over 40 paintings to concentrate on portraits of friends, family and strangers, figure studies, neighborhood scenes and landscapes.
Henry Taylor credits James Jarvaise with having been the first to recognize his talents in the early 1980s. At the time, Taylor was supporting himself as a psychiatric technician at the Camarillo State Mental Hospital while pursuing a range of interests, including classes in journalism, cultural anthropology and set design at Oxnard College. There, he repeatedly enrolled in Jarvaise’s painting class, where he was introduced to the works of Max Beckmann, Jean Dubuffet, Philip Guston, Cy Twombly and other modernists who were entirely new to him. The title is taken from advice Jarvaise imparted to his student: the words of a vital teacher who offered Taylor many lessons on how to build a painting with integrity.
When exhibited together, the works of Jarvaise and Taylor appear to be in clear dialogue with one another. Works such as Jarvaise’s Hudson River School Series, alongside Taylor’s paintings featuring landscapes, have a strikingly similar resonance and shared sensibility. ‘Sometimes a straight line has to be crooked’ connects Jarvaise and Taylor formally—works on view spotlight the two artists’ approaches to massing flat shapes that move between figuration and abstraction, and their talent for deploying off-beat colors, strong tones, straight horizons and curvaceous lines—and unites them energetically across time.