Nick Taggart: Art School Portraits from 1974

February 26th–March 3rd, 10am–5pm

Opening Sunday, February 25th, 1–4pm

21658 Encina Rd., Topanga, CA 90290

For its inaugural exhibition, GALLUCCI TULL is pleased to present a series of graphite drawings by the UK-born, LA-based artist Nick Taggart. Opening Sunday, February 25th, 2024 from 1–4pm and running through March 3rd, the exhibition takes place in a geodesic dome on the site of the Encina Artist Residency in Topanga Canyon, California, a 20-minute drive from Frieze Art Fair.

Art School Portraits from 1974 comprises eight never-before-exhibited works on paper completed during the artist’s final weeks as an undergraduate at Torquay School of Art, three years ahead of his move to Los Angeles. One drawing is a self-portrait; the others depict Taggart’s colleagues.

Artistic sensibilities were in flux in 1974. Philip Guston, who had recently departed the Ab-Ex movement in favor of an expressionist realist style, had declared American abstract art “a lie, a sham, a cover-up for a poverty of spirit. A mask to mask the fear of revealing oneself.”[1] In the US, the most exciting art of the time emerged from a burgeoning counterculture and a fascination with the human condition. Writing in New York magazine under the headline “The ‘Me’ Decade,” Tom Wolfe would call this cultural moment The Third Great Awakening, an “unprecedented post–World War II American development: the luxury, enjoyed by so many millions of middling folk, of dwelling upon the self.”[2]

Today, Taggart remembers making the portraits of himself and his school friends as a diaristic effort: this was his crew, carefully assembled and earnestly depicted, just as they were in the days before he left Torquay for the continuation of his art education at Cambridge. Taggart’s sitters are barely out of their teenage years, floating heads centered on the page. Feathered strands of hair hang into empty space, hardly a suggestion of a neck and never any shoulders to distract from the face’s essential features. It may have been The Me Decade, but Taggart was working within an English tradition of pictorial reportage linked to the popularity of lithographs in the Illustrated London News, a lineage dating back to the mid–19th century.

Later, Taggart’s drawing style would take on a Fauvist extravagance in color, and later still a geometric angularity that aligned with the New Wave aesthetics of 1980s Los Angeles, eventually inviting commissions from Van Halen, Richard Pryor and the iconic LA novelty boutique Heaven.

Fifty years after their completion, it is fitting that Taggart’s Art School Portraits from 1974 are making their debut inside a geodesic dome, also constructed in the mid-1970s. Geodesic domes, invented by a transcendentalist architect, are enduring symbols of the counterculture, built of intersecting lines. The occasion represents a full-circle moment for the works, serving as a reminder that, for many artists and artistic practices, the path is not linear but curved.

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[1] Quoted: Peter Campbell, “At the Royal Academy: Philip Guston Fouls the Nest,” London Review of Books, vol. 26, No. 3, February 5th, 2004.

[2] Tom Wolf, “The ‘Me’ Decade: The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self,” New York, August 23, 1976.