Untitled (100% Hawaiian)

Although he began his career as a painter, Taylor turned to sculpture and drawing in the mid-1980s. During his short life he produced more than 5,000 drawings, which, while related to his three-dimensional constructions by their subjects, form an independent body of work of great sensuousness and painterliness. This still-life of tin cans hanging from wires is characteristic of the way Taylor transforms the most ordinary objects into compositions of striking originality and technical virtuosity. The sense of humor that pervades the work and the skill with which Taylor explores the qualities of each medium--for instance, the shininess of graphite to suggest the metal surface--are also representative of Taylor's singular contribution to drawing at the end of the twentieth-century.