In 1985 Howard Taylor was the first artist to be awarded the Australia Council’s Emeritus Award for senior artists. The same year, he was honoured with a retrospective by the Art Gallery of Western Australia, curated by Gary Dufour, who is also responsible for the current exhibition, Howard Taylor: Phenomena. Recognised for his very successful career in Perth, Taylor has nonetheless remained a local hero, virtually unknown in the eastern states.

Many people’s introduction to Taylor’s work came during the exhibition Phenomena: New Painting in Australia at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Melbourne’s Ian Potter Gallery in 2001, the year of Taylor’s death, aged eighty-three. There, curator Michael Wardell placed Taylor’s works as the altarpiece in a chapel of painting that reified an abstracted art sensitive to natural forces. With this major retrospective exhibition – formerly at the Museum of Contemporary Art, now at the Art Gallery of Western Australia -Taylor is finally getting his due. Taylor’s exhibition surveys a lifetime of making drawings, paintings and sculptures, and is accompanied by a major catalogue, with a biographical essay by the Art Gallery of Western Australia’s Gary Dufour and the MCA’s Russell Storer, who analyses the enigmatic beauty of Taylor’s late works.