Philip Guston

Timothy Taylor Gallery is proud to announce a major exhibition of paintings from the Estate of Philip Guston.
 
Critically acclaimed for his abstract expressionist paintings of the 1950s, in 1968 Philip Guston broke through the current prescriptions against figuration and embarked on arguably his most powerful body of work: the everyday life of painting, eating, and politics, ‘a world of tangible things, images, subjects, stories, like the way art always was.’
 
This exhibition features raw and urgent paintings from the decade 1969 – 79. Real objects from the studio are made mysterious and unknowable, together they show an open and horizontal world in which clusters of objects appear, lost or waiting to be discovered through the act of painting. They are the result of Guston's refusal to become one of those painters 'who know what to make and how to make what they know'.
 
A book entitled 'Philip Guston Talking' will be published to accompany the exhibition, containing the rare re-print of a great lecture given by Guston at the University of Minnesota in March 1978, and edited by Renée McKee.
 
Philip Guston has been the subject of only two prior solo exhibitions in London, at the Whitechapel Art Galley in 1962, and again at the Whitechapel in 1982 following Guston’s death in 1980. The upcoming survey exhibition The Art of Philip Guston at the Royal Academy of Art (24 January—12 April 2004), will track Guston’s work from the 1930s through his abstract paintings of the 1950s and 1960s, and the startling figurative work of 1969 until his death in 1980. Initiated by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, this exhibition has also travelled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.