Jay-Z favourite Henry Taylor is painterly first, political second

It isn’t the most likely combination. An African-American artist from a rough part of L.A. doing a residency at an idyllic West Country gallery – and exhibiting there afterwards. But that’s exactly what the much-hyped Henry Taylor has been up to at Hauser & Wirth Somerset.

The artist – beloved by musicians Rihanna and Jay Z, as well as seemingly every American art critic – spent much of the winter locking down in rural Bruton, making works for a show that has just opened.

The results are impressive (even if his disdain for titles is frustrating). There are several self-portraits, one of which depicts Taylor in pin-striped pyjamas flanked by two local sheep in a field. In another, he’s in profile and full regalia, imitating the (only) painting of Henry V in the National Portrait Gallery. Taylor is playing here on the fact he and the monarch share a first name; and on the viewer’s surprise at seeing a contemporary black man in a medieval white king’s clothes.

Given the isolation that Covid has forced on us, one suspects countless artists have embraced self-portraiture recently. Taylor is at his best, however, when capturing others. His subjects are usually black but, to his credit, he is painterly first and political second. Though many of his works have racial undercurrents, they tend to remain just that: undercurrents.

Take the picture of a bare-chested man with his back to us, looking wistfully out to sea. Typically for Taylor it’s painted in vibrant colours and a folk style. The rich, blue water takes up more than half of the canvas, its depth matching the profundity of the man’s longing. Only on close inspection can one read the word “Miami” in tiny letters above a speck of distant land, revealing this is a Cuban with dreams of escaping to the US. What, though, would a black man such as he encounter there?

Taylor, 63, came to art in his thirties, while working as a technician at a Californian mental hospital: he painted patients in his spare time. It’s only in the past few years that his career has taken off (he represented his country at 2019’s Venice Biennale).

Some of his early work is on show, mostly paintings on cigarette packs and cereal boxes from the days when he couldn’t afford canvas – but these are the least interesting exhibits.

In an essay about Taylor in The New Yorker magazine in 2018, the novelist Zadie Smith wrote that, for African-Americans, “getting to the top never entirely shields you from the bottom”. The artist duly depicts black people from across the social spectrum: from homeless people on Skid Row to Chuck Berry (who is rendered like one of Toulouse-Lautrec’s cabaret stars in Montmartre).

Taylor routinely throws us into the midst of a narrative that it takes time to make sense of. Such is the case with the surreal, bronze sculpture shown in the gallery’s garden. It’s of a man in a Black Panther jacket, who has antlers emerging from his neck instead of a head. The stimulus was a grim bumper sticker that Taylor’s brother had seen years ago in the Deep South, which read “I couldn’t find a deer, so I shot me a n****r.”

What prompted Taylor to remember this in 2021? Apparently, the herds of deer that have roamed in Bruton for centuries. The best artists find inspiration however far they are from home.

Until June 6. Tickets: hauserwirth.com; 01749 814060