"Philip Guston 1954-1958" Exhibition
Mnuchin Gallery
This event has ended.
"In Philip Guston: 1954-1958," L&M Arts is proud to exhibit a select group of seven paintings from this extraordinary period, including loans from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and important private collections.
Philip Guston's development over this short time depicts a poignant struggle between nascent figuration and abstraction, structure and raw sentiment. The artist's interest in brushstroke, touch, and construction as it simultaneously emerges and dissolves, presents itself in Painting (1954). This delicate tension between composition and expression grows increasingly palpable. In Beggar's Joys (1954-55), the encounter erupts as a contained explosion of disintegrating form. Flat, clustered shapes grow in confidence, vibrancy, and scale in Dial (1956), an outpouring expanding with astonishing emotion in Prague (1956), Processional (1957), and The Mirror (1957). Guston questions the classification of form as exactly realistic or abstract. This is particularly true of To Fellini (1958), an homage to filmmaker Frederico Fellini, described by Michael Auping as "a cryptic theater of potential enigmatic scenes… a dense and shadowy drama in which twisting forms push their way from edge to edge."
Media
Schedule
from January 15, 2009 to February 28, 2009