Henry Taylor at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles

Henry Taylor celebrates his mentor James Jarvaise: A Personal and Painterly Reunion

Opening this June at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles, “Sometimes a straight line has to be crooked” (June 28 through October 5, 2025) is an exhibition and an homage. This landmark show brings together the work of artist Henry Taylor and his late mentor, California modernist James Jarvaise, forming an unprecedented intergenerational dialogue that’s equal parts reverent and radical. For Taylor, who remains one of the most compelling voices in American portraiture today, this moment is deeply personal. It’s a chance to celebrate the teacher who saw potential in him before the art world did.

Spanning over 70 years, the exhibition offers an expansive look at both artists’ practices. Taylor has curated the show with signature vision and feeling, selecting key works from Jarvaise’s prolific output—including collages from the 1950s, figurative paintings from the ’60s, and large-scale burlap works from the ’70s. These historic pieces are placed in direct conversation with over 40 works by Henry Taylor, spanning his own three-decade career. Viewers will encounter his raw, expressive portraits of family, friends, and strangers; depictions of daily life; and most notably, new explorations into landscape.

The exhibition’s title, drawn from advice once offered by Jarvaise, resonates as a poetic thesis: straight lines may be efficient, but truth and artistry demand more detours, more curves, more color.

Henry Taylor and James Jarvaise: Bridging Generations Through Paint

The emotional core of “Sometimes a straight line has to be crooked” lies in Henry Taylor’s tribute to the man who profoundly shaped his early journey as an artist. Back in the 1980s, Taylor was working at Camarillo State Mental Hospital while dabbling in various community college classes—from journalism to anthropology. But it was in James Jarvaise’s painting classes at Oxnard College that Taylor found his focus. Jarvaise introduced him to the work of Beckmann, Guston, and Dubuffet, and encouraged him to see himself as an artist with something to say.

Taylor never forgot that support. Even after enrolling at CalArts, he continued to seek out Jarvaise’s guidance, often waiting in the parking lot with paintings loaded in his car, hoping for feedback. That relationship—a mix of mentorship, critique, and unwavering belief—forms the emotional scaffold of this exhibition.

While Taylor and Jarvaise’s visual vocabularies differ, their energies align. Taylor’s vibrant, often politically charged works sit compellingly beside Jarvaise’s atmospheric abstractions. Both artists explore the space between figuration and form, the real and the remembered. Whether it’s Taylor’s portrait of Jarvaise or Jarvaise’s introspective Man in the Room, their shared sensibility emerges in their manipulation of space, shape, and color.

In curating this show, Henry Taylor offers us more than a retrospective—he gives us a masterclass in artistic gratitude, showing how influence endures across decades. And for viewers, the exhibition is a unique opportunity to understand how the gesture of a teacher can ripple through a lifetime of creation.