PHILIP GUSTON

Interiors were among Guston’s favourite subjects, often conveying themes of confinement and isolation. His repeated creation of these images yielded a distinctly iterative artistic process, as evident in ‘Room’ (1980). Sharing the same title as a 1976 painting, this work depicts a chair piled high with a tangle of disembodied legs. Guston arranges the objects as in a still life, although he avoids any clear narrative, instead creating a sense of tension and entrapment. By tilting the picture plane towards the viewer, Guston infuses this abstracted but still recognisable jumble of objects with a sense of urgency, heightening the sense of immediacy and confinement.

This kind of anxious energy can also be felt in Guston’s renderings of the sky. The artist often used the sky as a backdrop for conflict, delving into its most evocative aspects in these late prints. Forms in works like ‘Aegean II’ (1977)––one of the two paintings on display in the exhibition––reappear in later prints such as ‘Sky’ (1980), where they are exploded, echoed and layered, as they become interconnected in their struggle against one another.