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The American artist Philip Taaffe was born in 1955 in Elisabeth, New Jersey, and studied at the Cooper Union in New York in the 1970s under the German conceptual artist Hans Haacke.
Taaffe’s ‘Intersecting Balustrades’ is one of his few sculpted canvases and refers directly to the wrought-iron balustrade of the stairwell in the Jersey City Public Library, which is situated in the immediate vicinity of Taaffe’s studio.
Speaking about the work, created in 1987, Taaffe himself says that it holds a special place in his oeuvre: here, he brought together many of the design principles he had learnt and combined drawing, printmaking, collage and painting. ‘Intersecting Balustrades’ is strongly site-specific and, in a sense, engages with the theatre of the absurd. Moreover, it contains a great deal of memory. Whilst the overall architectural structure may appear somewhat static, the individual elements are extremely dynamic – the windmills and spirals extending in various directions may well symbolise both a look back and a step forward. Taaffe himself suggested that this was the first work in which he had found his very own voice.
With ‘Intersecting Balustrades’, he also alludes to the colour scheme and external form of the ‘Notched V Paintings’ series by the American artist Frank Stella (1936–2024) from 1964–65. Taaffe alludes to Stella’s work, yet deviates from its strictly structural principles. The reference to the older painter’s works is therefore rather subtle.