Leon Golub's Late Drawings Reveal Ferocious Final Years at The Drawing Center

The Drawing Center presented "Leon Golub: Live & Die Like a Lion?" from April 23 to July 23, 2010, at its 35 Wooster Street location in New York City. This exhibition featured fifty small-scale drawings from the artist's final six years, created primarily with ink and oil stick on 8 by 10 inch sheets. While Golub was widely recognized in the 1980s for large-scale paintings depicting torture and political violence, his late work took a more elliptical and personal turn. The show included pieces like No Escape Now (2002), which revisited themes of bound victims, and Blue Movie (2004), depicting passionless couples. Satyrs, licentious women, lions, and skeletons populated these later drawings, with text often competing visually, as in FUCK DEATH (1999). Curator Brett Littman highlighted Golub's own statement about wanting drawings to be "political, erotic, neurotic, just rotten." Source material displayed in vitrines revealed Golub's process, drawn from newspaper photos, fashion magazines, and sports pages. Works like Bones (2002), showing a dog approaching a skeleton, and GUNMAN CAUGHT IN RED ABSTRACTION! (2002) demonstrated his playful engagement with abstraction, a mode he had once denounced. The exhibition presented an artist confronting mortality with ferocious humor and condensed pictorial intelligence in his eighth decade.