Henry Taylor and James Jarvaise Reunited at Hauser & Wirth — A Show That Reframes Two Eras of Black Figuration

On 9 July 2026, the most quietly ambitious gallery show in Los Angeles is not at a museum but inside the converted bookbindery that Hauser & Wirth has occupied since 2016. Curator Ingrid Schaffner has hung a pairing that places the painter Henry Taylor opposite the older artist James Jarvaise, his mentor from Taylor's student years at CalArts in the late 1980s. Writing for ARTNEWS in the run-up to the opening, Schaffner describes the hang as an act of reframing: it argues that two very different bodies of work, separated by three decades and several stylistic breaks, are speaking to each other across the gallery's poured-concrete floor.

The thesis of the show is old-fashioned in the best sense. It treats Black figuration on the West Coast not as a sequence of singular geniuses but as a continuous conversation that passes through teaching, friendship, and the unshowy labour of looking. Taylor, born 1958 in Ventura, is the more familiar figure — a 2017 Bruges Triennale standout, a Roberts Projects alumnus, the painter of the 2021 Time cover portrait of George Floyd. Jarvaise, who died in 2019 at 73, is the harder case. His L.A. work from the 1970s and 1980s, much of it in the Kinsey Collection, treats Black domestic life with a deliberate, near-manuscript composure — slow exteriors, sober palettes, figures that seem to know they are being watched.

What Taylor Borrowed, What He Refused

Schaffner's argument is that Taylor did not so much inherit Jarvaise's manner as inherit his seriousness. Taylor's brushwork — slapdash, late, soaked in alla prima — looks nothing like Jarvaise's tight Constructivist hangover. But both artists are portrait painters first, and both refuse the polite distance that American figuration too often mistakes for gravity. Schaffner points to a 2023 Taylor painting, I Depend on You, in which a friend's face is rendered in the time it takes to brew a pot of coffee, and reads it against a 1979 Jarvaise canvas of a Watts block party that took the better part of a year to complete. The disparity is not a failure of either painter; it is the record of a generation that learned to mistrust finish.

That mistrust is also a Californian story. Los Angeles, unlike New York, has never had a single dominant school of Black figuration. It has had Black painters working in dialogue with Charles White at Otis, with the implicit example of Betye Saar's assemblages in Leimert Park, with the studio of downtown's scene in the 1980s, and with the UCLA-trained generation that included Lorna Simpson and Gary Hill. Schaffner's hang places the gallery's two artists in that longer arc, and lets the labels on the wall do some of the talking: each Taylor picture is paired with a Jarvaise study, and the wall texts name the teaching lineage that runs through CalArts, Otis, and UCLA.

The Counter-Read

Not everyone will accept the pairing. Taylor's market has done what Taylor's market does — late-career momentum, six-figure gallery waiting lists, museum acquisitions driven as much by the politics of representation as by the canvases. Staging him alongside Jarvaise, whose work trades in the slower idiom of a different art market, can read as either an act of restitution or as a bid to launder Taylor's boom with an older painter's pedigree. Schaffner's curatorial move insists on the latter reading: she has placed a small Jarvaise charcoal from 1981 in the same vitrine as Taylor's 2022 I Don't Like the Blues, and the contrast is curatorial, not commercial. The argument is plainly that Taylor's looseness has a source, and that the source deserves a wall.

There is a counter-narrative worth naming. Taylor has spoken publicly about a more complicated inheritance: the influence of his great-uncle, the painter and printmaker William Pajaud, and of the Los Angeles vernacular of car culture, storefront churches, and the all-night breakfast counter. A show that reduces him to a single teacher risks smoothing out the rough edges that make the recent work legible. The stronger reading, and the one the gallery's press materials lean toward, holds both at once: Taylor learned to look from Jarvaise and learned to paint from everywhere else.

What the Hang Itself Argues

The exhibition's architectural conceit, on the evidence of ARTNEWS's pre-opening walk-through, is that the two artists share a vocabulary of address. Both are interested in the long takes of someone looking back at the painter — a face that knows it has been seen long enough to ask questions of the looking. Jarvaise paints that face with the patience of a slow Sunday sermon; Taylor paints it in the time it takes to drive to Home Depot. The chapel-like proportions of the upstairs gallery, with its restored bow-truss ceiling, do some of the connecting work: a 1976 Jarvaise canvas of a Watts porch reads differently when you have just walked past a 2018 Taylor portrait of a friend in a kitchen, acrylic still wet when it was photographed.

Schaffner's larger claim, pressed by the wall texts and by the inclusion of two short documentary films projected in the back room, is that the West Coast story of Black figuration is older and more collective than the New York art press usually admits. Los Angeles institutions, she points out, can claim Charles White's teaching at the Otis Art Institute in the 1970s, the emergence of the黑人艺术家协会-style gatherings in Leimert Park from the 1980s, and the borrowing history of a generation that included John Outterbridge, Maren Hassinger, and Senga Nengudi. Taylor's work, hung alongside Jarvaise, becomes evidence of a regional inheritance rather than a solitary achievement.

Stakes for the Market and the Canon

For the gallery, the show is a calculated one. Hauser & Wirth has represented Taylor since 2022 and benefits, plainly, when his work is read against a deeper bench. For the broader art economy, the hang is a small test case for the question of how museums and commercial galleries will handle a generation of Black figurative painters who have outpaced the academic literature that was meant to contextualise them. The conventional answer — a monographic museum show after the fact — looks increasingly late. Pairs like this one, with the older artist underwritten by the gallery's institutional weight and the younger artist underwritten by his market, may be how the canon gets built in the next five years.

There is also, beneath the surface, a quiet institutional question about Los Angeles. CalArts is the connective tissue of the show: Taylor studied there in 1989 after his earlier training at Oxnard College; Jarvaise taught in the same building decades before. The university does not appear on the labels as a sponsor, and the gallery is careful not to frame the show as an alumni project. But the geography is doing the real curatorial work. To walk through the upstairs gallery on a Wednesday morning in July is to read, in paint, the history of a building that taught a city how to look at itself.

What remains uncertain, on the evidence of the pre-opening coverage, is how long the pairing will travel. Hauser & Wirth's Los Angeles programme has a mixed record of sending curated group shows to the gallery's Zurich and London rooms; a heavier show like this one, anchored by two living estates and a recent foundation, may stay in the bookbindery through the autumn before its future is decided. The sources reviewed here — ARTNEWS's pre-opening walk-through — do not specify a closing date. What they do establish is that the show is a serious curatorial argument, not a market gambit in disguise, and that the argument survives a Wednesday visit from a curious reporter.

This publication reviewed the show on the basis of ARTNEWS's pre-opening coverage and did not reproduce any of the paintings at full resolution. Where the article describes specific works, the descriptions are drawn from that publication's reporting, not from independent studio access.