Sam Taylor-Wood

A leading artist of her generation, Taylor-Wood came to prominence in the mid-1990s as one of the YBA’s (Young British Artists), the British art movement that propelled artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin to celebrity status for their provocative and sensational works. Taylor-Wood has since become renowned for deftly manipulating the signature media of our age—photography, film, and video—into compelling psychological portraits. The exhibition brings together an outstanding selection of 29 works from the mid-1990s to the present, including photographs as well as single-channel and projected film installation work.

Drawing freely from a variety of sources ranging from classic opera to Renaissance and Baroque painting to Hollywood, Taylor-Wood’s thought-provoking portraits and film work focus on the various states of human emotion. In her carefully staged work, her characters often grapple with mental and physical breaking points. The video Hysteria, 1997, portrays a woman’s tumultuous descent from a state of exhilaration to a palpable anguish. The poignant and beautifully rendered Crying Men, 2002-2004—a series of photographs that depict Hollywood leading men such as Laurence Fishburne, Ed Harris, and Benicio del Toro, among others, in moments of sorrow and introspection—also evokes the ambiguity of real emotion.

More recent works explore the artist’s fascination with suspended states—the sense of being caught in between two worlds. In David, 2004, Taylor-Wood photographs soccer icon David Beckham asleep, caught somewhere in the nether world of dreams. In the photographic series Self Portrait Suspended, 2004, Taylor-Wood appears utterly weightless and graceful as she is caught suspended in mid air in what appears to be a quest to reach a moment of “absolute release and freedom.”