Hearne Pardee, Katherine Bradford, Gaby Collins-Fernandez, Stephen Ellis, David Humphrey, David Rhodes and Jennifer Riley discuss Philip Guston, Painter, 1957–1967 at Hauser & Wirth, New York, on view through July 29, 2016.
In an enlightening and lively discussion, the panelists consider Guston's work in a range of contexts. Gaby Collins-Fernandez comments: "I’ve been trying to imagine what it felt like for those to be the last things Guston had made, the freshest and newest! Very intense and strange. Looking at them, I got the sense of someone trying to make emotional room in painting from physical, spatial terms that weren’t available in the dominant painting discourse of the time. I read the shadows and the way the forms feel heavy and connected to gravity in terms of a desire to understand forms in relation to recognizable physical-causal dynamics — to make abstract, all-over mark-making compete with gravity, light, and the kinds of environmental conditions that stuff, matter, and people have to deal with, outside of blank, white surfaces."