Taylor McKimens grew up in Winterhaven, California, a small desert town on the Mexican border, with no access to museums but deep exposure to cartoons, comics, signage, and printed imagery. These core influences remain central to his work, preserving a working-class graphic visual language while allowing it to coexist with formal rigor and forging a hybrid folk approach to contemporary art. He treats drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation as a single, interconnected language, collapsing distinctions between flat and three-dimensional forms. The imagery and approach are defined by a collision of extreme opposites, resulting in a contrast therapy of clashing concepts and sensations. With humor infused with sincerity, McKimens reveals a profound beauty and humanity embedded in the discarded and marginal. His works tell folk tales about the sublime in the pop-cultural debris of the contemporary American West, in its own graphic visual language.

McKimens, (born 1976) received a BFA from Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. After years in New York he has returned to Los Angeles where he now lives and works. He has exhibited internationally in galleries and museums and is included in many prominent collections. Solo exhibitions include Deitch Projects, Art Rock at Rockefeller Center and The Hole in New York; The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, Japan; Dio Horia in Mykonos, Greece; Studio d'Arte Raffaelli in Trento, Italy; Galerie Zürcher in Paris, France; and Loyal Gallery in Stockholm, Sweden. Group exhibitions include PS1 MoMA, Deitch Projects, The Hole, The Journal Gallery, White Columns, and The Neuberger Museum in New York; The DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece; the MACRO Museum in Rome, Italy; The Garage Center in Moscow, Russia; Museum of Modern Art in Saint-Étienne, France; ARoS Kunstmuseum in Aarhus, Denmark; Portugal Arte 10 in Lisbon, Portugal; The Riverside Art Museum in Riverside, CA; and Peres Projects in Berlin, Germany.