Nick Taggart: From Camden Town to Tinseltown: 1976 - 1983: Curated by Michael Slenske

Megan Mulrooney is pleased to present From Camden Town to Tinseltown: 1976 - 1983, the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Curated by Michael Slenske, this selection of paintings and works on paper span 1976-1983, and trace a defining period in Taggart’s career, capturing the city as both a subject and a state of mind.

Born in Stockport, England, in 1954, Taggart arrived in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, drawn to its openness and creative energy. He quickly became immersed in the city’s cultural industries, producing album covers, magazine illustrations, and paintings that straddled the line between commercial work and a more personal vision of the city. The works in this exhibition—some commissioned, others made from direct observation of scenes and people—offer a view of L.A. that shifts between intimacy and detachment, warmth and cool remove.

Spanning the soft haze of the ’70s to the electric velocity of the early ’80s, Taggart’s works depict a city in flux. In some works, freeways cut through the landscape like charged veins, their glow turning the urban sprawl into something hypnotic and unreal. Elsewhere, softly-rendered signs hover over fashionable shop fronts, while houses settle quietly into foothills. Taggart taps into LA as a city of surfaces—glassy, scintillating, and hard-edged—but also one of sun-faded posters, slow afternoons, and unpolished bohemia. Taggart renders both with equal clarity, attuned to the tension between the city’s theatricality and its moments of unexpected solitude.

His portraits—of musicians, actors, and everyday passersby—likewise oscillate between sleekness and imperfection. Some are the refined, carefully staged images of an era transfixed by appearances; others, painted from life, catch their subjects in unguarded moments. Street scenes unfold with the rhythm of a place always on the move, where light, signage, and architecture shape an ever-changing stage.

Though widely circulated at the time, Taggart’s work never fully aligned with the dominant fine art movements of the period. His commitment to figuration and cultural storytelling placed him outside an art world increasingly concerned with conceptualism and abstraction. This exhibition revisits his contributions, foregrounding an artist whose images—whether glowing with possibility or edged with intensity—distill something essential about the City of Angels.

Nick Taggart (b. 1954, Stockport, England; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) studied at Bideford Art School, Devon; Torquay College of Art, Devon; and Cambridge School of Art in Cambridge, England. His work has been featured in exhibitions at 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 many others. His work is in the collection of MOCA, Los Angeles.