For its booth at Frieze New York (Booth B7), Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present ‘Philip Guston, Roni Horn, and Paul McCarthy’, spotlighting the achievements of three masters of American art whose ideas and influence continue to shape the work of younger artists. During Frieze Week, Hauser & Wirth will also present a Pop-Up Bookshop in its 18th Street gallery, featuring over 30 publications, including new catalogues on Philip Guston and Fausto Melotti.

Among the great luminaries of contemporary art, Philip Guston (1913 – 1980) is renowned for an oeuvre born out of emotion and lived experience, and as an avatar of the defining struggle between abstraction and figuration in American painting. At Hauser & Wirth’s booth at Frieze New York, Guston’s ‘Black Coast’ (1977) will be on view, along with two ink on paper drawings from the mid-1970s. ‘Black Coast’ confronts the viewer with a cluster of bare, hairy legs pointing skyward from a horizon line, crowned with black-soled shoes silhouetted against a pink sky. This characteristically allegorical late work by the artist, rich in the language of Guston’s dark personal vocabulary of symbols and hues, represents his furious return to figuration from a long phase of celebrated, luminous abstraction. From the late 1970s until his death in 1980, Guston wrestled everyday reality into a strange, complex, and foreboding universe in a series of renowned paintings that continue to exert influence upon artists today.

Along with Guston’s work at Frieze New York, the exhibition ‘Philip Guston: Painter, 1957 – 1967’ is concurrently on view at Hauser & Wirth’s 18th Street location. Featuring 36 paintings and 53 drawings, many on loan from major museums and private collections, the exhibition draws together a compelling body of work that reveals the artist grappling to reconcile gestural and field painting, figuration and abstraction. The show is on view through 29 July.

Acclaimed artist Roni Horn engages issues of identity, place, memory, and perception. Like Guston and Paul McCarthy, she employs a highly personal visual language that courses through a substantial oeuvre through repetition and variation. Horn’s powerful, enigmatic, and luminous work is wholly unique. At Frieze New York, Hauser & Wirth will present a selection of glass works that link the relationship of time to space and light, and challenge the viewer to reconcile the eye and the mind. Horn’s glass sculptures appear to shift – massive but mutable, solid but liquid – suggesting the equally changeable fluid state of identity in relation to the world at large. A selection of works from the artist’s Hack Wit series of drawings will also be on view. A primary activity for Horn, drawing is another medium through which recurring themes of identity, interpretation, mirroring, and textual play can coalesce. In her Hack Wit series, idiomatic turns of phrase and proverbs are worked to engender nonsensical, jumbled expressions that ambush expectation. Here Horn intertwines not only phrases, but also the paper upon which they are inscribed, so that process and meaning merge into a single flow of energy.

Paul McCarthy is a contemporary figure whose work also delves into the darker realities percolating beneath the surface of America’s psychological landscape. His challenging, visceral work in a range of mediums – from performance, photography, video, and installation, to sculpture, drawing, and painting – explores our popular illusions, delusions, and cultural myths, incorporating repetition as a strategy and challenging the expected in both formal and intellectual terms. At Frieze New York, Hauser & Wirth will show ‘SC Western, Red River, Red’ (2014) and a series of drawings from the artist’s ongoing Stagecoach (SC) series inspired by the classic film ‘Stagecoach,’ a 1939 American Western starring John Wayne. The movie follows a group of strangers travelling across the United States in a stagecoach pursued by Apache Indians. With ‘SC Western, Red River, Red,’ McCarthy uses the Western as a recognizable structure from which to form alternative interpretations, focusing on social interaction between the genders, with cowboys and ‘saloon girls’ reappearing as central characters.

Pop-Up Bookshop To coincide with Frieze New York, Hauser & Wirth Publishers will host a Pop-Up Bookshop at the Roth New York Bar at Hauser & Wirth’s West Chelsea location at 511 West 18th Street. Focusing upon the gallery’s work with estates and celebrating the recent release of ‘Fausto Melotti,’ ‘Philip Guston: Painter, 1957 – 1967,’ and a new edition of ‘Night Studio. A Memoir of Philip Guston’ by Musa Mayer. The Pop-Up Bookshop will also spotlight books created with the estates of Hans Arp, Eva Hesse, Jason Rhoades, Mira Schendel, and others. The Pop-Up Bookshop’s mobile book display units were crafted by Björn and Oddur Roth, son and grandson of the late artist Dieter Roth, and creators of the Roth New York Bar. 

On Saturday 7 May, Hauser & Wirth Publishers will celebrate Chelsea Night with a Spring Release Book Party to toast its recent releases. This event will take place 6 – 8 pm and is open to the public.

www.hauserwirth.info

5 – 8 May 2016 Booth B7 (North Entrance) Randall’s Island, New York NY

Hauser & Wirth Pop-Up Bookshop 3 – 7 May 2016, 10 am – 6 pm Hauser & Wirth New York, 18th Street 511 West 18th Street, New York NY 10011 Spring Release Book Party: Saturday 7 May, 6 – 8 pm