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Jablonka Galerie is pleased to announce the opening of two exhibitions of new works by Philip Taaffe.

For the past thirty years Philip Taaffe has explored the vast range of abstract painting, while in the process expanding and enlarging its vocabulary. His earliest works of constructivist austerity were followed by appropriationist adaptations of many of the icons of non-objective art. Taaffe’s subsequent investigations have focused on the interconnections between painting and architecture, anthropology, archaeology, and natural history. His 2008 retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, The Life of Forms: Paintings 1980-2008 revealed the unity of Taaffe’s multifarious concerns, described by curator Holger Broeker as “The pictorial grammer generated from forms and colors—as well as the cultural codes associated with them—develop into a wholeness that has the character of universal harmony.”

Philip Taaffe is especially gratified to be exhibiting in the Böhm Chapel in Huerth, not only because of his deep involvement with painting as an active component of architectural space, but also because of his oft-stated belief in the sacramental nature of the act of painting: “What I look for in a work of art, in painting, is that it offers some healing power which can protect us and strengthen our sense of what we most love about being alive in this world. That’s what a sacrament is. It is the affirmation of life.” (The Life of Forms, p. 228)

Throughout his career Philip Taaffe has explored the relationship of painting to sacred spaces, ritual processes, and ecstatic and meditative states, in traditions as various as the ceremonial arts of Japan, the mediation of ornament in Islam, and the Iconostasis of Eastern Orthodox churches. In his present body of work created for the Böhm Chapel, Taaffe has returned to an abiding inspiration: the medieval illuminated manuscript. For Taaffe the illuminated manuscript was an ideal container for subjects as diverse as theology, science, astrology, and medicine, with its calligraphy, marginalia, and gold leafing, its architectural unity of page design, and its interweavings and decorative flourishes.

At the Jablonka Galerie/Jablonka Pasquer Projects (Lindenstrasse 19, 50674 Köln) Philip Taaffe will exhibit new small-scale works, and thirty-six drawings made between July – September of 2011 which continue the artist’s series of “Floating Pigment” works, utilizing the technique of paper marbling.