MUNICH.- The Staatliche Graphische Sammlung is hosting an extensive exhibition featuring about 85 artworks, from large-scale lithographs to smaller acrylics, by the influential North American artist Philip Guston (1913-1980).

Following the much-acclaimed exhibition of Philip Guston’s drawings organised by the museum in 2007/08, the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung is dedicating a further show to this artist which will be structured in three sections: in addition to his lithographs, the exhibition will present drawings, which Guston created since the sixties in collaboration with contemporary writers and poets, as well as an important ensemble of 26 acrylic works that he completed in spring 1980, the last productive period of his artistic career.

Alongside Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston was one of the most important and influential American artists of the 20th century, known especially for his range of expression and the ever-changing style of his works. Among the significant representatives of American post-war art, Guston was probably the one who made the greatest attempt to lead a creative dialogue with European culture. He never saw himself as an artist committed to one particular style and the construction of a unique gestural ‘signature’. Philip Guston was rather the archetypical existentialist artist who – driven by restlessness, self-doubt and a maniacal work drive – was on the hunt for the unknown, the undiscovered, which he then sought to convey in images.

The present exhibition spans his entire oeuvre of printed works with sixty large-format lithographs on display. His initial experiments with this medium resulted in a first group of prints, created between 1963 and ca. 1967, which retained the lyrical, abstract style that had already earned Guston considerable international acclaim at that time. Guston’s art was never completely nonrepresentational, even in his abstract years.

After a long break, Guston was only to return to lithography in the winter of 1979/80, six months before he died. These prints were all created in an extremely short space of time, as if in a single run. They are a testament to Guston’s lifelong passion for the very essence of drawing. Like a kind of visual autobiography, they feature the complete repertoire of familiar objects that had recurringly appeared in Guston’s art since the late sixties.

The lithographs must certainly be regarded as one of the primary sources of inspiration for the 26 works on paper in ink and acrylics, which Guston produced in spring 1980. They alone can provide us with an insight into Guston’s last creative ideas as a painter. Never seen before in Europe on this scale, almost the entire series will be on display at the exhibition.

Together with the first comprehensive presentation of Guston’s graphic works for magazines and books, which were inspired by numerous poets and writers with whom he was acquainted, visitors to the exhibition will gain an excellent overview of the creative variety and poetic depth of his work.

Three publications will accompany the exhibition: a catalogue raisonnée of his prints with an introduction by Michael Semff, a publication of his drawings for poets (with an essay by Bill Berkson and a foreword by Michael Krüger), and a catalogue of his coloured acrylic works from 1980 (with texts by Stanley Kunitz and David McKee).