Leon Golub
Danse Macabre
March 14 - May 15, 2014
Opening Thursday, March 13, 2014 7-9 pm

Thursday, March 13, 2014, 7-9 pm
Opening reception

Conversation on the exhibition
Dr. Martin Engler, Head of Contemporary Art, Städel Museum Frankfurt
Prof. Philip Golub, Professor of Political Science and International Relations, American University of Paris
Friday, May 9, 2014, 6 p.m.

Leon Golub (1922–2004) was one of America’s great political painters. Keenly observant, he registered the upheavals and dislocations of an openly or latently aggressive society: racism, urban crime, the abyss of war, physical and psychic infirmities, and bottled-up, repressed rage. Golub became famous for his monumental, nearly cinematographic cycles of paintings of warfare in Vietnam, Mercenaries, and Interrogations. They are historical paintings without heroes, in which the focus is on the human body as the actual site of violence. With the events of September 11, 2001 and the United States’ “war on terror,” these works took on a new currency, to which Golub reacted with a final group of large format tableaus, seen at the Documenta 11 in 2002. The exhibition at Barbara Gross Galerie spans the arc from these to the more intimate, but no less volatile works on paper Golub produced in his final years of creativity.


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