Felix Art Fair: Nick Taggart: Love Letter to LA

Nick Taggart

Love Letter to Los Angeles

Felix Art Fair | Room 1110

February 19 – 23, 2025

“All these people came [to LA] looking for what [Nick] painted...but it doesn’t exist anymore.”

Megan Mulrooney is delighted to present Love Letter to Los Angeles, a solo presentation of works by Los Angeles-based artist Nick Taggart at Felix Art Fair 2025. The Roosevelt Hotel offers a fitting context for introducing a series of Taggart’s paintings from 1976–1987. The hotel, steeped in Hollywood glamour and creative history, parallels Taggart’s deep connection to Los Angeles’ cultural scene during the 1970s and ’80s. 

Born in Stockport, England, in 1954, Taggart moved to Los Angeles in his early twenties, captivated by the city’s radiant light and vibrant energy—so unlike the village where he grew up in South West England. Drawn to LA’s warmth, creative industries, and freethinking community, he quickly developed a lifelong bond with the city. As an outsider, Taggart brought a fresh perspective, crafting visuals for New West, Esquire, The New Yorker, and album covers for The Beach Boys, Richard Pryor, and Loggins and Messina. His work became a defining export of LA’s distinctive style, reaching global audiences and embodying the city’s sunlit allure.

Taggart’s work captures the essence of 1970s and ‘80s Los Angeles. His portraits of models, musicians, and actors immerse viewers in the era’s unique atmosphere, reflecting not just fashion and lifestyle but also architecture, design, commercial culture and street life. Other works document LA’s iconic locations, from the Sunset Strip to unassuming big-box stores, creating a vivid tableau where past and present collide. Straddling the line between idealized and documentary, Taggart’s work offers a rich, transportive glimpse into a now-vanished era of the city.

Despite his artistic prowess, Taggart’s choice to embrace commercial work at a time when abstraction dominated the fine art world led to his exclusion from mainstream fine art discourse. For decades, much of his oeuvre remained unseen. This presentation highlights a trove of watercolors, oil paintings, and sculpture that reflects the artistic and cultural pulse of Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s. Each work serves as a love letter to the city, capturing its light, vibrancy, and people through the discerning lens of an artist who once viewed it from the outside.

Nick Taggart (b. 1954, Stockport, England; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) studied at Torquay College of Art in Devon and Cambridge College of Art in Cambridge, England. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Angles Gallery, Santa Monica; Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica; Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; Signal Gallery, London; San Jose Museum of Art; and ODD ARK•LA, Los Angeles, among others. Taggart’s work has appeared on the covers of books, vinyl records, and other publications.