A Painter's Forms: Interview with Musa Mayer

There is an unlikely combination of colors—shades of pink, red and gray, side by side—that belong unmistakably to the paintings of Philip Guston, who first achieved recognition in the 1950s as an abstract expressionist of the New York School. Yet that same palette, and a bold but wobbly line, carried over to the figurative paintings he slowly transitioned toward making during the late 1960s—a time when the gospel of avant-gardism preached only abstraction. In these iconic, countercultural paintings, Guston developed an alternative American world of symbolic forms including clocks, watches, cigarettes and boots, Ku Klux Klan-hooded figures, as well as cartoonishly slim and hairy limbs, all in surrealistic, often comically grotesque arrangements, which emerged partly as a response to the upheavals of the time. The exhibition “A Painter’s Forms, 1950–1979,” presented at Hauser & Wirth in Hong Kong, draws from works from the period of significant shift in the artist’s practice. ArtAsiaPacific spoke to Musa Mayer—daughter of Philip Guston, curator of the show, and author of a memoir on her father—about the works on view. 

• Hong Kong
• USA