Bill Scott

Hollis Taggart is delighted to present Bill Scott: Another Chance to Get It Right, which marks the artist’s eleventh solo show with the gallery since joining its roster in 2004. The exhibition spotlights a group of new paintings from his studio and will be on view on the first-floor annex of Hollis Taggart in Chelsea from February 26 to April 4, 2026, with an opening reception on Thursday, March 5 from 6 to 8 pm.

“Painting for me is a non-verbal endeavor. My work evokes floral, garden, and water imagery but what I seek is a fictional feeling of unachievable calm, maybe even wonderment. Kindness. Harmony. Although my paintings are abstract, my hope is that they appear believable, symbolic of an of an actual place. Or an imagined space. That is what I yearn for, and this keeps me afloat. The only time I have absolutely no fear is when I paint,” Scott says.

Rooted in his hallmark vivid color palette, Scott’s paintings are radiant, with a quality of surface achieved through the thinnest applications of paint and the use of various techniques honed over decades. A recurring motif in his oeuvre – and in this new show – is the circle, which Scott tentatively considers a “placeholder for flowers or another form… a circle can also simply be a way for the painting, or a part of it, to remain momentarily afloat.” Indeed, buoyancy is a sensibility that permeates his works; Scott has described his uplifting, high-key color palette also in terms of its ability to “act as a buoy to keep [him] afloat.” Like the historical artists that have influenced his artistic development, such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, and Henri Matisse, Scott creates paintings that transport us to states of wonderment and pleasure through the banal and everyday.   

Scott begins his works with no predetermined destination; he is fascinated by the questions and unknown possibilities of a painting’s life and believes that the process through which a painting comes into being is its content and narrative. Often working on paintings off and on for two or more years, Scott strives for “another chance to get them right,” as the title suggests. The four largest paintings in this exhibition, for example, went through numerous changes. As the artist explains, “I rarely abandon any in progress even if I’m stuck with a feeling of impossibility, as if [the paintings] are refusing to cooperate with me. I don’t rush but move forward with baby steps.”

Bill Scott credits his time spent with artists Joan Mitchell and Jane Piper for profoundly influencing his practice. Piper was an important early mentor to the young Scott, who first wrote to her at age sixteen hoping to visit her studio. This mentorship was enhanced by a close friendship with Mitchell, whom Scott met in 1980. Throughout the 1980s, Scott frequently visited Mitchell at her home in Vétheuil, at times painting in her studio. He received from his formal education at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1974 to 1979. Scott’s works are held in the collections of the British Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Asheville Art

Museum, Delaware Art Museum, and Munson Museum of Art, among others. In 2017 Rider University organized an exhibition including 22 of his works dating from 1997 to 2017. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, ARTnews, New York Times, and Philadelphia Inquirer.

For more information about Another Chance to Get It Right, please contact us at info@hollistaggart.com or +1 212.628.4000.

For press inquiries, please contact Aga Sablinska at aga.sablinska@gmail.com or +1 862.216.6485.