Leon Golub: Live & Die Like a Lion? is the first major museum exhibition to focus on the late drawings of the American artist Leon Golub (1922–2004). This presentation features approximately 50 oil stick and ink on Bristol board and vellum drawings made between 1999 and 2004. It also includes Golub’s only existent unfinished painting—a chalk sketch of two lions—which he started in 2001 but never completed, as well as preliminary ‘background’ drawings and the artist’s original source material from a variety of wide-circulating periodicals. Although he was most often noted as a painter, Golub used drawing as a foundational tool in his practice. The drawings on view mark a stylistic and thematic shift from a long-term preoccupation with the atrocities of the external world towards an exploration of the personally revelatory. The resulting works are candid examples of an aesthetic immediacy and newfound freedom in the artist’s late work.
This exhibition is curated by Brett Littman, Executive Director of The Drawing Center, and will travel to the Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL (September 24, 2010–December 12, 2010) and The Museum Het Domein, Sittard, Netherlands (January 22, 2011–April 24, 2011).
Curated by Brett Littman, Executive Director of The Drawing Center