For Immediate Release: September 29, 1998
LEON GOLUB:
OCTOBER 17 – NOVEMBER 14
Leon Golub will show new paintings at the Feldman Gallery in an exhibition entitled Dead Certainties + The Blue Tattoo. Born in 1922, Leon Golub is one of the world’s leading postwar painters. His work was last seen in New York in 1996 at the Feldman Gallery and the New York Kunsthalle.
In Dead Certainties + The Blue Tattoo, Prometheus questions his actions – a little late unfortunately; a fatigued lioness questions why things have to be the way they are, and various other questions are evoked. Golub has traveled a distance from the confrontational Mercenaries and Interrogations of the 1980’s. But one recognizes fierce asymmetric slants on power and vulnerability.
Golub self-satirically calls these paintings "pseudo or crypto-metaphysical." He wanders in the collapsed spaces of modernism, an extraordinary intermix of "Everything." Mixing it up – "smartass, fatalistic, irritable, imaging our gross or false selves and science fiction futures."
Leon Golub’s recent paintings are as tough as anything he’s made in previous decades but they are different.
Gone are the "in your face" scenes of brutal men and their victims, and reduced is the labor intensive process of painting/eroding/scraping/painting cycles that contributed to the nervous energy of his politicized figures. What
remains is a late style and a late content, as Golub points his critical gaze at the interrogations within himself and
painting itself. He is producing oblique images with hit and run structures; locating portions of protagonists (Gods,
humans, animals) that assemble less and overlay more than past efforts. His new takes on old myths are constructed
with drybrushed modeling and bursts of high keyed color, called into question by haiku-like bits of provocative text.
Stuart Horodner, Director, Bucknell Art Gallery
Golub (jointly with Nancy Spero) was awarded the 3rd Hiroshima Art Prize and retrospective exhibition at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art in 1996. Most recently, June 1998, his installation "Image Violence" was mounted at the European Workshop of Arts and Culture Hellerau, Dresden. The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, will inaugurate a traveling retrospective in 2000.
Do Paintings Bite?, Golub’s texts from 1948–1996, edited by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, was published by Cantz Verlag in 1997.
There will be a reception on Saturday, October 17 from 6:00 – 8:00. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 – 6:00. Monday by appointment. Contact Breck Hostetter for more information and photographs.
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