Tate Modern is hosting a significant exhibition featuring the renowned 20th-century artist Philip Guston (1913-1980), marking his first major retrospective in the UK in two decades. The exhibition showcases over 100 paintings and drawings spanning Guston's 50-year career, providing insights into his early years, activism, abstract phase, and thought-provoking late works. Shaped by personal tragedy and societal injustices in the United States, Guston's art defied categorization and continually pushed the boundaries of painting.

The exhibition begins with Guston's upbringing as the child of Jewish immigrants who escaped persecution and migrated to Los Angeles in 1922. Self-taught, he drew inspiration from cartoon imagery, European Old Masters, surrealism, and Mexican muralism, expressing his response to societal injustices through art. Guston's murals and collaborations, including the radical protest mural created in Mexico in 1934, are highlighted, and a projection of this work is displayed at Tate Modern. He later moved to New York, contributed to the New York School's abstract art movement, and participated in influential exhibitions.

As the late 1960s unfolded, Guston grew disillusioned with abstraction, grappling with the concept of evil. His work began to depict hooded Ku Klux Klan figures in mundane settings, prompting controversy and criticism. Despite the backlash, Guston's return to Italy and subsequent work involving Rome's ruins and gardens are featured in the exhibition. His final decade, spent in relative obscurity, was incredibly productive and marked by collaboration with poets and the creation of distinctive, dream-like imagery for which he is well-known. The retrospective at Tate Modern runs until February 25, 2024.