Taylor William McKimens grew up in Winterhaven, California, a small desert town on the Mexican border, where, before having access to fine art, he absorbed a visual language from cartoons, cereal boxes, comics, off-brand advertising, dollar bills, amateur painted signs, construction-site messes, desert debris, fleshy cacti and the psychedelic visual culture of the American Southwest. Rather than shedding those early influences as he entered the art world, McKimens honed and developed them as part of a generation of artists who came to define New York’s downtown art scene in the early 2000s.
Those influences remain central to his work, preserving their vernacular graphic character while coexisting with formal rigor and forging a hybrid folk approach to contemporary art. Over more than twenty years, this language has expanded from drawing into painting, sculpture and entire environments. McKimens treats these forms as interconnected, collapsing distinctions between flat and three-dimensional space and approaching sculpture as drawing made physical.
His work is driven by collisions between apparent opposites: beauty and ugliness, sophistication and crudeness, humor and sincerity, the psychedelic and the mundane, folk culture and contemporary art. Through these tensions, McKimens finds beauty and humanity in what is discarded, marginal or overlooked. His works function as anecdotes of nuance and beauty drawn from the pop-cultural debris and physical landscape of the contemporary American West, voiced earnestly in a graphic dialect distinctly his own.
McKimens received his BFA from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. He has exhibited internationally for more than two decades, with solo exhibitions at Deitch Projects and The Hole in New York; Watari Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo; Galerie Zürcher in Paris; Loyal Gallery in Stockholm; Dio Horia in Mykonos; and Studio d’Arte Raffaelli in Trento. His work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1 and White Columns in New York; MACRO in Rome; Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art in Athens; ARoS Kunstmuseum in Aarhus; and the Museum of Modern Art Saint-Étienne, among others. After many years in New York, McKimens returned to Southern California and currently lives and works in Los Angeles.