WHO KNEW I WOULD PAINT YOU BLUE (2025)

Henry Taylor (born in 1958 in Ventura, California) is a leading figure in contemporary American painting, known for his socially critical work. Paradoxically, it was whilst working as a care assistant in a psychiatric hospital, during his studies, that his artistic practice began to take shape. The media he employs range from figurative painting to installations made of found objects, helping him to explore the richness and complexity of the human experience. It is particularly through his numerous depictions of friends, loved ones, but also anonymous individuals and public figures that Henry Taylor intertwines individual trajectories with collective realities, combining personal experiences, shared memory and dialogues with art history. His reinterpretations of works by artists belonging to the pantheon of that same history—notably those of David Hammons, Philip Guston and Pablo Picasso—demonstrate how Henry Taylor draws on the past to speak of the present.

In the work WHO KNEW I WOULD PAINT YOU BLUE (2025), composed of dense surfaces of colour, a woman with her legs crossed stands out against a background whose perspective appears distorted. The predominance of blue in the palette, specifically chosen to suggest the flesh of the female figure, could be a reference to the English expression “feeling blue”, as well as an evocation of Picasso’s famous Blue Period. The most recent work featured in the exhibition at the Musée Picasso-Paris, as well as in the catalogue, this portrait of the artist's partner bears witness to the importance, in his work, of the connection with intimacy and family history.

The limited edition of the same name is produced from the original work, as part of a collaboration between Éditions Dilecta and Musée Picasso-Paris, on the occasion of the solo exhibition Where thoughts provoke dedicated to his work at the museum until September 6th, 2026.