Taglialatella Galleries will be the next stop for the vaunted WEST tour, an exciting collection of original paintings by British contemporary artist Russell Young. First exhibited at the Modern Art Museum in Shanghai, China - followed by Marfa, TX and Los Angeles, CA - WEST will make its way to Taglialatella’s flagship location in the Chelsea arts district for its New York City debut.    

WEST taps into primal instincts and grandiose American dreams. Living and painting on what Young calls the “edge of America,” this body of work looks upon wide open vistas and imagery aimed to expand understandings of freedom, danger, and possibility. The journey towards these vistas begins in the anamorphic widescreens of Western films that Young watched growing up in Northern England. These fantasies eventually led him to America, where he has roamed ever since, unafraid to embody a land full of contradictions. 

In WEST, Young both venerates and pulls apart “Wild West'' mythology to reveal the many prisms that underscore the particularly American need for reinvention even when it sacrifices truth. Young makes no such sacrifice; instead he holds all the things we choose to love and choose to erase in equal measure. The series features imagery, references, and obsessions of Young’s own world built within the larger framework of the American drama. The spaghetti westerns he watched in his youth, NASCAR racers before they were safely regulated, 70s big wave Hawaiian surf photography, California girls, Hells Angels, nickel plated revolvers, bison, rodeos, the Marlboro Cowboy before he was commercialized into oblivion, Native American chiefs before they, too, were almost driven into oblivion—they all debut in Young’s quest to confront and interrogate the idealization of the American Southwest. The breadth of this ever-expanding body of work is matched only by Young’s impulse to venture into the deserts and forests and oceans of America, to go as far west as possible.

I am rain, horses, whiskey,
murder, chaos, terror, gasoline,
lust, heartbreak, damnation, love, Hollywood, lost, paranoia, horror, violence, redemption, rattlesnakes, sage, desert, raven, rolling thunder, Hells Angel, cowboys, girls,
rustlers, riot, cold wind,
the Pacific and dust and death and God. West. 

We invite you to join us for an opening reception on April 28that Taglialatella Galleries, from 6 - 8 pm, at 229 10th Ave. Please RSVP to the gallery reception by contacting Taglialatella Galleries at (212) 367-0881 or email [email protected].