In the Autumn of 2023, Philip Guston Shines

For over 50 years, Philip Guston incessantly created paintings and drawings which captured the turbulent world around him. Born in Canada to a family of Jewish immigrants, raised in the United States and becoming one of the most celebrated abstract painters of the 1950s and ‘60s, along with Mark Rothko and his childhood friend Jackson Pollock, Guston initially created murals and paintings that took on the themes of war and racism in America. The social and political upheavals of the end of the 1960s brought him to criticize abstract painting and to create large scale paintings populated by comic figures, some wearing white hoods, symbolizing evil and the perpetrators of racism, such as the Klu Klux Klan. Many of these paintings, along with the works which made Guston one of the most influential painters of the end of the XX Century, map out the itinerary that the Tate Modern dedicates, from the 5th of October 2023 until the 23rd of February 2024, to one of the most captivating artists of the XX Century. The first large retrospective, in the United Kingdom in almost twenty years, dedicated to the artist, will guide the public through the universe of the painter inspired by the world of nightmares which surrounded him, giving life to images and paintings which united the personal with the political, abstract and figurative, the comic and the tragic.