Leon Golub Exhibition: Interview with Martina Batan

“I have always dealt with stress and violence (…) Mercenaries, interrogations, the white squads: they all deal with this kind of thing, brought up to date, brought into the immediate, into what I think of as our immediate, instantaneous, contemporary world.” Leon Golub

Born in 1922, he started the main body of his work in the postwar period, having rejected Abstract Expressionism while it still dominated New York in the 1940s. He is probably best remembered for his paintings depicting the events and political figures of the times, thus ever-present violence, wars and dictators. Those works reflect his commitment to the political and social issues of the times he lived through, until his death in 2004. However, there is also a classical side to Golub: many of his works were devoted to mythological subjects, which ironically do not lack a dose of violence themselves.