Taylor Dafoe

New York

Journalist and Photographer at The Art Newspaper

Writer | Photographer

Articles

Prospect.6 Casts New Orleans as a Harbinger and a Harbour

Oct 27, 2024 | frieze.com | Taylor Dafoe

New Orleans’s singularity has always been a blessing and a curse. The ‘City That Care Forgot’, they call it, a sticky nickname now coated with irony. What was once a nod to its easy-going charm is now just as emblematic of the conditions that led to its devastation. In either case, it’s easy to think of New Orleans as being held back by its past. But for curator Miranda Lash and artist Ebony G. Patterson, the artistic co-directors of the sixth Prospect triennial, the opposite is true.
Yu Hong’s moment in the Western market has finally arrived

Oct 22, 2024 | theartnewspaper.com | Taylor Dafoe

Yu Hong’s art has always been grounded in the world around her. With Bible-sized themes and a social realist’s eye, the painter has limned an evolving psychological portrait of post-reform China across the last three decades and counting, cementing her status as one of the country’s most accomplished artists in the process. But while preparing to unveil a new and surprisingly introspective body of work at Lisson Gallery in London, the 58-year-old was feeling at sea.
The New Generation of London Painters Embracing Abstraction

Sep 27, 2024 | sothebys.com | Taylor Dafoe

A new cohort of London-based artists is reinvigorating abstract painting for the millennial mind. Linked by overlapping years spent at the city’s leading art schools, they are erupting onto the scene and raising questions once again about the capital’s creative magic. Step inside the studios of four fresh painterly powerhouses.
Painters Were Obsessing Over the 'Demure' Trend Long Before TikTok Did

Sep 25, 2024 | culturedmag.com | Taylor Dafoe

Sabrina Bockler, Love Potion, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist. “Very demure, very mindful,” Jools Lebron said of her workday beauty routine in an Aug. 2 TikTok clip. For the popular trans influencer, it was a joke—an offhand jab at respectability politics dressed in diva steez.
Will AI Change Art History Forever?

Aug 29, 2024 | artnews.com | Taylor Dafoe

It’s not often that the work of authenticating art makes mainstream news, but that’s exactly what happened last year when a team of researchers in the UK determined that an anonymous, centuries-old painting known as the de Brécy Tondo was likely made by the Renaissance giant Raphael. It was a bold claim—one with potentially huge financial implications—but what really caught people’s attention was the technology the researchers used to get there: AI.
Will AI Change Art History Forever?

Aug 29, 2024 | flipboard.com | Taylor Dafoe

CultureNowHe Bought a Modest Farmhouse.
Noguchi and Marisol sculptures lead sale of storied Abrams family collection

Aug 26, 2024 | theartnewspaper.com | Taylor Dafoe

Over two generations, six decades and thousands of titles, the father-and-son co-founders of Abbeville Press, Harry and Robert Abrams, pushed the art book to new heights. They also amassed a world-class collection of 20th-century art along the way. Now many of their works are set to hit the auction block for the first time at Sotheby’s in New York.
‘Whatever the It factor is, she seems to have it’: behind the surging popularity of Francesca Mollett’s mysterious paintings

Jun 19, 2024 | theartnewspaper.com | Taylor Dafoe

There is a paradoxical logic to many of Francesca Mollett’s paintings. The simpler they appear, the stranger they seem; the less recognisable they look, the more familiar they feel. “I’m trying to get close to the effect of something, and in the attempt to get close, it starts to escape a bit,” the London-based artist says of her slippery, impressionistic work—a growing favourite among curators and collectors alike.
A Rising Sculptor’s Skeletal Bison Faces Off With the Wall Street Bull in Lower Manhattan

Jun 3, 2024 | culturedmag.com | Taylor Dafoe

Cannupa Hanska Luger, Attrition, 2024. Photography by Nicholas Knight. All images courtesy of the artist and Public Art Fund. At the dawn of the 1800s, as many as 60 million bison roamed North America. By the end of the century, there were fewer than 1,000. The more settlers went west, the more these creatures were slaughtered. So extreme was the carnage that transcontinental train passengers occasionally reported strange scenes on the summer plains passing by.
Collectors stampeding to Lucy Bull's 'visionary' abstractions

May 17, 2024 | theartnewspaper.com | Taylor Dafoe

Some artists prefer to keep home and work separate. Not Lucy Bull. In-progress paintings are everywhere in the 34-year-old’s lofted, two-storey home in East Los Angeles: on the walls of her street-level studio, yes, but also in the kitchen, on a couch, even beside her bed one floor above. The artist’s painstaking process makes working on several pieces at once a prudent use of time, but it is more than that.