Leon Golub

Leon Golub. From 5 May to 12 September 2011

Jon Bird, curator: Certain paintings have a resonance, which is not just to the eye.
Golub is a history painter and he’s also a realist painter, although it’s a form of critical realism. He depicts scenes of violence and torture which are perpetrated by governments, both officially and unofficially. We look coming from a particular position and we make decisions about what we see.

To understand a story involves a process of decision-making. It’s both a record, a document of something, but you are a witness, you are a witness to something. And you can’t witness without being involved with making these kinds of decisions. The figures that he depicts has its source within the mass media. Painting is a slow art – its uniqueness, its specialness – but it also means that we need to spend time. A picture, a photograph, is so familiar, and offers its image, its message so quickly, so immediately that it becomes the everyday currency and it implies, it suggests that the viewing process is a slowed-down process, which I think opens it up to a much more complex range of possible interpretation.

Chicago had a strong figurative tradition. There was a group of artists in the 1950s called the Chicago Monster Roster school, which is how to come up with a visual imagery that was appropriate to a post-war subjectivity. Now for the abstract expressionism, that went on a kind of inward journey. For Golub particularly, he has a similar belief, but the belief is that that it is carried by the figure and early paintings – there’s a number of paintings from the 1950s where the Holocaust is a reference point. Certain paintings have a resonance which is not just to the eye. And one of the things about Golub’s work – not just because it deals with the figure – is that it is a relationship to the body and to the viewer’s body, so there is a kind of corporeal sense to them. You can think also about other kinds of sounds, but also through a sense of tactility, through sound, through other senses. In the later works, where he starts to introduce a much more fractured and schematic imagery, and lions and dogs and skeletons come in.