Coinciding with the release of ‘I Paint What I Want to See,’ a collection of Philip Guston’s writings, lectures, and interviews published by Penguin, Hauser & Wirth London will display a rarely seen selection of Philip Guston’s Poem-Pictures from 5 – 20 April 2022. In these illustrative works, Guston’s drawings interact with selected lines of poetry by his wife and poet Musa McKim and American poet Clark Coolidge.
On Tuesday 29 May, Hauser & Wirth opened it's second exhibition at the gallery’s Hong Kong outpost. ‘Philip Guston. A Painter’s Forms, 1950 – 1979’, curated by the artist’s daughter Musa Mayer, consists of almost 50 paintings and drawings from the last three decades of the artist’s life, surveying Guston’s major developments during his highly experimental career.
Late in life, Guston looks back over a career that originated in social realism during the 1930s, moved to the center of Abstract Expressionism, and culminated in a return to figuration. Filmed at his retrospective in San Francisco in 1980 and at his Woodstock studio where he is seen painting. The artist speaks candidly about his philosophy of painting and the psychological motivation for his work.
As late as he came to the style, by 1957 Philip Guston was a highly admired first-generation Abstract Expressionist – a phrase he hated. How ‘late’ was Guston?
