Leon Golub: Live + Die like a Lion?
Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University
September 21–December 12, 2010
The Drawing Center
35 Wooster Street
July 25, 2013–July 23, 2010
De Domijnen
Ligne 2
January 1–April 30, 2011
Curated by Brett Littman
Leon Golub was at odds with the world and with himself for most of his long career. His contrarian, combative stance gives his work a ferocity that catches people off guard. Famous in the 1950s, when abstraction ruled the roost, for huge antiheroic canvases of gigantic warring figures, Golub reemerged in the neo-expressionist ’80s with stark muralsize tableaux of political violence in the shadows of the American empire. Unable to paint on such a scale during his last years, he drew prolifically instead. This exhibition features fifty-odd drawings he made between 1999 and his death in 2004. The harsh symbolic imagery, graphic nuances, and Brechtian “disgrace” notes of these late works are a startling coda to an ever-adversarial life.