Geri Taper

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY AND STATEMENT

Geri Taper (1929–2004)’s forms in  Red and Blue are sensual and organic suggesting a landscape of the life force and human's movements. She reduces everything in two colors. The image that resembles a double kite creates a movement as it is multiplied and attached together in multiples of four. It is like a visual manuscript of movement in space and time. She said, “The images are the music.”

Geri Taper moved to New York City in 1976 from Pittsburgh where she had established herself as a leading artist, her career culminating in a show of large-scale works at the inaugural exhibition of the Sarah Scaife Gallery at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Drawn to the vitality and promise of an emergent Soho, for the next twenty years Taper vigorously pursued a career that included individual and group exhibitions at the city’s foremost galleries (David McKee, A.M. Sachs, Theodore Haber), foundation grants for special projects (New York Foundation for the Arts), commissions for the interior and exterior renovation of commercial and industrial properties in Long Island City (Falchi, Redstone Rocket and Center Buildings), and the design of a multi-colored banner at Queensboro Plaza Station sponsored by the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA).

Taper's work has been collected by such greats as Alice Tully (Lincoln Center), Agnes Gund (MoMA), and approximately 50 of her large “Red and Blue” series were collected by the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance.

For more than 25 years, Taper's paintings have been involved with forms through color. The lyrical energy of form flows from one painting to the next with bold colors and forms changing shape from one to the next.