Craig Burnett

An illustrated examination of Philip Guston's comic and complex painting The Studio. Throughout his career, Philip Guston's work metamorphosed from figural to abstract and back to figural. In the 1950s, Guston (1913–1980) produced a body of shimmering abstract paintings that made him—along with Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline—an influential abstract expressionist of the “gestural” tendency. In the late 1960s, with works like The Studio came his most radical shift. Drawing from the imagery of his early murals and from elements in his later drawings, ignoring the prevailing “coolness” of Minimalism and antiform abstraction, Guston invented for these late works a cast of cartoon-like characters to articulate a vision that was at once comic, crude, and complex. In The Studio, Guston offers a darkly comic portrait of the artist as a hooded Ku Klux Klansman, painting a self-portrait. In this concise and generously illustrated book, Craig Burnett examines The Studio in detail. He describes the historical and personal motivations for Guston's return to figuration and the (mostly negative) critical reaction to the work from Hilton Kramer and others. He looks closely at the structure of The Studio, and at the influence of Piero della Francesca, Manet, and Krazy Kat, among others; and he considers the importance of the column of smoke in the painting—as a compositional device and as a ghost of abstraction and metaphysics. The Studio signals not only Guston's own artistic evolution but a broader shift, from the medium-centric and teleological claim of modernism to the discursive, carnivalesque, and mucky world of postmodernism.

The Studio

Philip Guston

Eberhard Havekost

Eberhard Havekost makes dense, anti-gestural paintings that explore the tension between a highly mediated image and the visceral immediacy of a seductively painted surface. Working from shots from TV and video, images from magazines and catalogues and his own photographs, he selects subjects ranging from anonymous buildings, trains and trailers, and modifies them - sometimes just painting a section of the image - to make inkjet prints as the departure point for his paintings.

Guest

Noura Al-Maashouq

Laetitia Catoir

Bernar Venet at Cliveden

Gregory Crewdson

Overzicht van het werk van de Amerikaanse fotograaf (1962) met als decor het Amerikaanse suburbia waarin de wereld als cinematografische droom wordt weergegeven.

In a Lonely Place

Dieter Roelstraete

Luca Bertolo

This exhibition catalog for Italian artist Luca Bertolo (born 1968) features multimedia works created between 2012 and 2017, essays and a conversation with the artist. Paintings, neon signs and videos explore connections between word and image, building upon a theme from Feuerbach explored by the Situationists and Susan Sontag.

Craig Burnett

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