Philip Guston: The Last Prints

Timothy Taylor Gallery are pleased to present an exhibition of Philip Guston’s black and white lithographs, made between 1979 and 1980. Completed just prior to his death in 1980, Guston’s final lithography project depicts motifs and imagery typical of his late work.
 
Philip Guston’s late work ruminates on life itself. Using a heavy line that gives the portrayed objects an aggressive presence, he employs a vocabulary of motifs such as feet, flat-irons, shoes, books, brushes, nails, and random detritus - either piled up or rolled into a ball, as if all the fragments had congealed into one spiky mass. There is no getting away from Guston’s mad imagination as he unwittingly turns these harmless household objects into ominous portents.  Both grotesque and charmed his work maintains a precarious balance of contradictions that is the stuff of fairy tales. 
 
These are rare works never before shown in the UK. On display will be fifteen of the full set of twenty-five lithographs. These are all large works, printed in black and white on a variety of papers.