Philip Guston at Hauser & Wirth (18th St.)
Room, Sea & Sky
3 September – 26 October
Images courtesy of Hauser & Wirth Gallery
Phillip Guston’s Room, Sea & Sky offers a deep dive into his final creative period, where printmaking served as a physical and psychological release after his health restricted his ability to work on large-scale paintings. The exhibition is organized around three thematic categories that have recurred throughout his career: confinement (Room), confrontation (Sky), and despair (Sea). Each series of prints represents an evolution of Guston’s lifelong preoccupations, delivered through bold, graphic forms that grapple with issues of identity, isolation, and artistic struggle.
In the Room series, we are met with a stark sense of entrapment, captured in images like Room (1980), which brings together disembodied limbs in a still-life arrangement. There’s no straightforward narrative, but the tilted perspective pulls the viewer into a suffocating space, heightening the anxiety of the piled-up forms. This reflects Guston’s ongoing interest in the human condition—figures and objects merge into chaotic compositions, becoming metaphors for emotional and mental entrapment.
The more serene but equally tense Sea series contrasts the chaos of Room. While the images convey less angst, like the floating heads in Sea (1980), the tension remains beneath the surface, suggesting unresolved conflict. The juxtaposition of these prints with the more aggressive Sky works, like Aegean II (1977), reveals Guston’s masterful play between abstraction and figuration. This exhibition captures his final artistic journey, where each print pushes the limits of form, space, and emotion with a condensed energy that rivals his earlier monumental works.
