Leon Golub: Live & Die Like a Lion

Leon Golub: Live & Die Like a Lion? is the first major museum exhibition to focus on the late drawings of the American artist Leon Golub (1922–2004). This presentation features approximately 50 oil stick and ink on Bristol board and vellum drawings made between 1999 and 2004. It also includes Golub's only existent unfinished painting as well as preliminary 'background' drawings and the artist's original source material. Although most often noted as a painter, Golub used drawing as a foundational tool throughout his career. The drawings on view mark a stylistic and thematic shift from a long-term preoccupation with the atrocities of the external world towards a more nuanced personal investigation. The resulting works are candid examples of an aesthetic immediacy and newfound freedom in the artist's late work. Curated by Brett Littman, Executive Director of The Drawing Center, the exhibition will travel to the Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL (September 21, 2010–December 12, 2010) and The Museum Het Domein, Sittard, Netherlands (January 22, 2011–April 24, 2011).

Leon Golub (1922–2004) studied art history at the University of Chicago before serving in the U.S. Army as a cartographer during WWII. When he returned to Chicago he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received an M.F.A. in 1950. Along with a group of like-minded artists, including Nancy Spero, whom he married in 1951, Golub sought to develop a figurative style that responded to the political and existential conditions of the postwar period. Following a short stint of teaching in the Midwest, Golub and Spero moved to Paris in 1959. Returning to the U.S. by 1964, the artist moved to New York where he created his signature large-scale paintings that responded directly to current events, many of which he staunchly opposed.

Leon Golub
Live & Die Like a Lion?
Kurator: Brett Littman

Stationen:
23.04.10 - 23.07.10 The Drawing Center, New York
21.09.10 - 12.12.10 Block Museum of Art, Evanston
22.01.11 - 24.04.11 Museum het Domein, Sittard