March 2 – April 27, 2013

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The MCKEE GALLERY is very pleased to announce an exhibition celebrating the 100th year of PHILIP GUSTON’s birth, opening on Saturday, March 2, 2013.

As one of the great artists of the 20th Century who is as current and relevant today, it is hard to imagine that Guston would be 100 years old this year, underlining how revolutionary and prescient his art was. His figurative paintings blew open the caveats of 60s Color Field dogmas and did not embrace the irony of the Pop culture. Guston followed a solitary track: from doing a comic strip as a boy, to political realism, through Abstract Expressionism, he knew how to paint and what to paint—his form and content were matched. From autobiographical to universal subjects, Guston was a humanist, an existentialist, a free man who explored all avenues of his imagination and abilities to record the human condition.

The current exhibition of 25 paintings and drawings is not a retrospective but a spontaneous celebration, attempting to expand our understanding of Guston with works which have not been widely exhibited, interspersed with some Guston classics which have been shown and reproduced all over the world. This exhibition is meant to surprise us as well as to satisfy us, marking the centenary of one of our great artists.