Leon Golub

Golub has continuously explored the peripheries and interstices of the art/social intermix as efficient sites for action. Hans-Ulrich Obrist, editor. Leon Golub: Do Paintings Bite?

Leon Golub will exhibit two series at the Feldman Gallery: Graeco-Roman Colossi, large-scale coruscated lacquer paintings from 1959 – 1964, and Erotica, etc., recent 8” x 10” drawings/paintings on vellum and board.

The Colossi are hunks of physicality, a Graeco-Roman “idea” thrown into the modern mix of the 1960’s! Raw, relentless, eroded, they ride on cultural memory. They exhibit endurance and pathos; the paint surfaces are pierced, gouged, stressed.

The imagery of America in the 1960’s – the edge of the Vietnam War, student unrest, and violence – has little in common with the Graeco-Roman era. But there are lines of direction, of cultural force that point to unlikely mergers with the hybrid and media-driven modern world. We are directly in the line of fire.

Erotica etc., 2000 – 2003 explores, on a small scale, various interludes of the erotic. The disparity in scale between the two series is enormous; the psychic distance between the two is perhaps enormous? The artist poses the question as to how the two series contend with each other and whether they can infer the other’s reality?

A leading postwar narrative painter involved with political/cultural issues, Golub is the recipient of the 1996 Hiroshima Art Prize (jointly with Nancy Spero). Museum collections include The Whitney Museum of American Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Malmö Konsthall, Sweden; and the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Recent exhibitions of his work include one person shows at the Griffin Contemporary in Venice, CA and the Chicago Cultural Center.

Pressetext

Leon Golub
Graeco-Roman Colossi 1959-1964 + Erotica, etc 2000-2003