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Leon Golub Retrospective Catalogue

Leon Golub is a fully illustrated book/catalogue produced to accompany the retrospective exhibition at the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, published in two versions – English and Spanish. Besides my own essay, I commissioned and edited three further essays (Jo Anna Isaak, Serge Guilbaut and Satish Padayar) in collaboration with the publications department of the museum, with whom I worked on the design and layout. The publication was intended to introduce Golub to a new audience in Spain and to present new research on previously neglected aspects of his practice. My essay, ‘Reality Bites: The Ferocious Art of Leon Golub’ traces the aesthetic and thematic developments and innovations of Golub’s artistic career from the 1950s to 2004, arguing that his practice represents a form of critical realism which engaged, through a formal and expressive visual language, with an ethics of seeing. Included in this essay is a section on paintings never before exhibited or critically reviewed, the so-called ‘abstracts’ (Gates, Shields and Pylons) of the early 1970s, arguing that these works should be considered as a counter-narrative to contemporaneous developments in American modernism. Further, in researching the Golub archive, I discovered unpublished notes and quotations from the artist which provided both a narrative of the artist’s voice running through the publication, and a reconstructed essay on ‘History Painting…’, written during the 1980s.