LONDON.- Timothy Taylor is celebrating three decades of its programme and its relationships with artists with 30 Years, an exhibition on view in London from 23 April through 30 May. The landmark presentation brings together new, recent, and historic works by represented artists, alongside paintings by significant twentieth-century figures whose work the gallery has consistently championed over the past three decades. Together, the works reflect the gallery’s history, grounded in historical resonance and shaped by new perspectives.

The thirtieth anniversary offers an opportunity to reflect on the consistency, depth, and curiosity that have shaped Timothy Taylor’s programme, while acknowledging the artists who have helped define it. From the beginning, the gallery has celebrated painters, often following their exploration of other media. Foundational to this programme are works by Sean Scully, Jonathan Lasker, Philip Guston, Alex Katz, Kiki Smith, Simon Hantaï, and Antoni Tàpies, whose paintings and, in many cases, expanded work in mediums such as sculpture or printmaking have been central to the gallery’s identity.

The gallery’s first exhibition, in January 1997, presented new work by Sean Scully, marking the beginning of a decades-long collaboration that has included ten solo exhibitions. For the anniversary presentation, Scully has created a new square 70 x 70 cm painting on copper that exemplifies his ongoing exploration of a pared-back vocabulary of motifs. Across his compositions, subtly modulating blocks of densely layered colour are arranged in allover configurations.

Jonathan Lasker has likewise been central to the gallery since its earliest years, with compositions that bring a vital energy to its sustained engagement with painting. In the exhibition, he is represented by a 1997 painting teeming with his signature imagery of stylised gestures and graphemes, crisp colour, and formal play.

Timothy Taylor presented Philip Guston’s works on paper in 1999 and has since organised six solo exhibitions of his work. Untitled (Red Eyes), 1968–69, featured in the anniversary exhibition, was a central painting in the gallery’s 2015 exhibition of works dated 1969–1980, many of which had never been exhibited in Europe. These striking works resulted from Guston’s notable return to figuration in 1968 following a twenty-year period of abstraction.

In 2002, the gallery mounted Alex Katz’s first commercial exhibition in the UK and has since organised fourteen solo presentations of his paintings, often centring on the ninety-eight-year-old artist’s remarkable observation of the natural world. His most recent solo exhibition, Various Trees, closed in April at Timothy Taylor in London. In 30 Years, Katz’s Study for Blue Umbrella, 1972, an important portrait of his wife and muse, Ada Katz, captures a cool, poised elegance, distilled through his signature economy of line and luminous colour. The work carries the clarity and immediacy that define his most celebrated compositions, underscoring the enduring significance of the image within his oeuvre.

Timothy Taylor has also worked with Kiki Smith for twenty years. Her bronze Chandelier, Moth & Star, 2006, on view in the exhibition, was included in the gallery’s debut exhibition of her work that same year. The sculpture dimly lit the mythical installation, which explored the nuanced relationship between female sexuality and the natural world.

The gallery has collaborated with the estates of Simon Hantaï and Antoni Tàpies for more than a decade. In 2024, its exhibition of rare works by Hantaï, curated by Molly Warnock, was widely acclaimed and celebrated by the artist’s family. Hantaï’s Tabula, 1981, demonstrates the artist’s distinctive pliage technique, which involves painting folded, knotted, or crumpled canvas before unfolding and stretching it for exhibition. In this example, passages of orange and black are fragmented by areas of unpainted canvas, complicating the relationship between figure and ground.

Following Tàpies’s death in 2012, the gallery began working more closely with those stewarding the artist’s legacy, building on Timothy Taylor’s longstanding relationship with the artist after a 1991 meeting. It has since organised three solo presentations of Tàpies’s work in London. Paper vertical II 1999 T-7951, 1999, created toward the end of the artist’s seven-decade career, foregrounds Tàpies’s experimentation with the fluidity between material and form, language and idea, symbol and abstraction.

These works offer a portrait of the gallery’s foundations and are shown alongside new and recent works by primary artists Alicia Adamerovich, Marina Adams, Daniel Crews-Chubb, Ding Yi, Jorge Eielson, Armen Eloyan, Paul Jenkins, Sean Landers, Sahara Longe, Chris Martin, Eddie Martinez, Annie Morris, Richard Patterson, Hilary Pecis, Michel Pérez Pollo, Jiab Prachakul, Lauren Satlowski, Antonia Showering, Paul Anthony Smith, Honor Titus, Alice Tippit, and Martha Tuttle, as well as historical work by Eduardo Terrazas and Victor Willing. Together, these voices form an intergenerational dialogue that speaks to the gallery’s ongoing commitment to its artists, from those who helped shape its foundation to those whose work continues to define its future.