Michael Taylor is one of Australia’s foremost Abstract Expressionist artists.
He lives and works in the Monaro where he draws his inspiration from the natural world around him. He paints the landscapes and waterscapes of southeast New South Wales, capturing their rhythms and changing atmospheres. His paintings stand at the junction of landscape and abstraction, though they often appear to melt into total abstraction.
The artist has revised and adapted his gestural abstraction over the years so as to maintain it as his own instantly recognisable visual language. As the arts author and critic Professor Sasha Grishin has noted, “Taylor is a marvellous veteran expressionist painter who, if anything, has improved with age. His sense of touch has remained assured, the gestural qualities are free and bold while the palette is brilliant, vibrant and colour-saturated….. His paintings are a source of revelation and inspiration.”
Michael Taylor graduated from the East Sydney Technical College, now the National Art School, where he was taught by the eminent artists Ralph Balson and Godfrey Miller. He has been exhibiting regularly since 1963 and has participated in numerous international and Australian exhibitions. He was the subject of a major, 50-year retrospective exhibition at the Canberra Museum and Gallery in 2016. His work is held in a number of important collections including those of the National Gallery of Australia, all the state and regional galleries, as well as university galleries, corporate and private collections