Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays
"A conscious submission to pressures of the real world seems to underlie the work of Leon Golub, a resistant artist who chose to focus his attention on the events around him rather than become entangled--at the expense of greater institutional recognition--in the different mannerisms represented by the numerous tendencies that came and went during his lifetime." Manuel J. Borja-Villel, excerpted from Leon Golub.
Published by Koenig Books. Edited with text by Emma Enderby, Melissa Blanchflower. Text by Julie Ault, Jon Bird, Guy Brett, Avery F. Gordon, Hans Haacke, Alfredo Jaar, Samm Kunce, Oscar Murillo, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Lucy Raven, Martha Rosler, Kiki Smith.
Bite Your Tongue highlights key aspects of American figurative painter Leon Golub's (1922-2004) work drawn from his career of more than 50 years. From Golub's universal images of man, made in the 1950s, to his paintings, made from the 1990s until his death, that incorporated slogans, text and graffiti into dystopian urban scenes, Bite Your Tongue surveys Golub's most significant bodies of work. Increasingly politicized from the 1970s onward, Golub drew on the Vietnam War, American foreign policy and the rise of paramilitary soldiers in places like South Africa and Latin America for visual motifs and subject matter, paralleling his development as a committed antiwar activist. Bite Your Tongue illuminates Golub's unwavering commitment to his belief that art should have relevance in society.
Published by Turner. Text by Jon Bird, Jo Anna Isaak, Satish Padiyar, Serge Guilbaut.
Leon Golub (1922-2004) was one of postwar America's most politically engaged artists. His frieze-like figurations of human cruelty and the crimes of warfare kept political painting alive throughout the countless changings of the avant garde of the 1960s and 70s, and his vocal ethical stance and intransigent emphasis on content remains refreshing today. Golub addressed events as they unfurled, from Vietnam to South Africa to Iraq and Afghanistan, confronting chilling acts of brutality head-on, in a weathered, scratchy style synthesized from sources as various as Etruscan and Roman art, French history painting, pornography and sports photographs. This attractively designed full Golub overview accompanies a 2011 retrospective exhibition at the Reina Sofía. Including 150 color plates, it surveys paintings from the 1950s to the present, giving Golub's heroic life work its full due.
Published by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts/Griffin Contemporary/Anthony Reynolds Gallery. Essays by Robert Enright and Meeka Walsh. Interview by Douglas Dreishpoon.
Leon Golub is best known for his large-scale paintings of violence and the abuse of power, scenes as colossal in brutality as they are in size. But, throughout his long career, Golub was a prolific draftsman as well. With subjects ranging from the classical to the erotic, and media ranging from oil sticks, to conte crayons, to inks, to acrylics, Golub's drawings interrogate the condition of our world. His first major drawing period began when he was a student in the 1940s. He began to articulate the figure in motion as he embraced Graeco-Roman sculpture, and in recent years (2000-2004) his drawings became more informal and spontaneous, with subjects ranging from aggression to erotic fun and games. Don't Tread on Me! features beautiful color reproductions and is the first book dedicated exclusively to Golub's provocative mastery of the figure.
PUBLISHER Ronald Feldman Fine Arts/Griffin Contemporary/Anthony Reynolds Gallery
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 8.5 x 11 in. / 124 pgs / 99 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 2/15/2005 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2005 p. 102
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780971928923TRADE List Price: $30.00 CAD $35.00
Published by Onestar Press. Afterword by Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Dog is an intermix of dogs, art and politics that views dogs as myth, symbol, aesthetic musings, and in scenes of casual and/or extreme tensions. Leon Golub chose visuals that are jittered and visually and informationally fractured, concrete and irrational. According to critic J.G. Ballard, this final book in Golub's career since his recent death “challenges all our assumptions about what it is to be human, and convincingly shows that most of them are delusions.” Dog explores what the world and human life could be once humanism is put aside--and all through images of dogs: homeless dogs, bondage dogs, running dogs, atomic dogs and assorted canine-themed writings. A small, compact and thought-provoking manual.
PUBLISHER Onestar Press
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 5.5 x 8.75 in. / 96 pgs / illustrated throughout.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 2/15/2005 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2005 p. 131
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9782915359084TRADE List Price: $25.00 CAD $30.00
Published by Hatje Cantz. Artwork by Leon Golub. Edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Even in his earliest work, Leon Golub rejected the formalism of Abstract Expressionism and countered it with and activist, political approach to figurative painting. This collection of his writings includes interviews with the artist.
Published by MIT List Visual Arts Center. Artwork by Leon Golub, Nancy Spero. Contributions by Katy Kline. Text by Helaine Posner.
Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, artistic and marital partners for over 40 years, have created two sustained and uncompromising bodies of work that explore themes of power and vulnerability by confronting the social and political realities of our time. Golub's primary subject has been male aggression and its vulnerability; his large scale canvases are searing visions of brutality, violence and agony. Spero's art has been concerned with degrees of human suffering. In extended series such as Torture of Women, she links sadistic sexuality to the abuse of power, combining ancient and contemporary tales of gynophobic violence. Published to accompany the exhibition at the List Visual Arts Center at MIT. War and Memory includes an overview of the artists as well as an essay by curators Katy Kline and Helaine Posner.
PUBLISHER MIT List Visual Arts Center
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 9.5 x 12 in. / 104 pgs / 56 color / 11 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 12/2/1995 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 1995
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780938437482TRADE List Price: $27.50 CAD $32.50
Leon Golub
Leon Golub: Don'T Tread On Me!
Leon Golub: Dog
Leon Golub: Do Paintings Bite?
Nancy Spero & Leon Golub: War And Memory