If you had to choose a word to describe Leon Golub’s paintings, furious might come to mind. Golub (1922–2004) spent half a century speaking truth to power through a maelstrom of marks that were often scraped into the pigment with a meat clever. And as this selection of works shows, his outrage remains undiminished by time.
Death and the abuse of authority, often interlinked, are the subjects in the works on paper and canvases here, including the searing Napalm I, with its seemingly flayed figures arranged in an agonizing frieze. Incisive as it is brutal, the piece speaks not only to the evils of political oppression but also to the artist’s determination to dismantle them a stroke at a time.—Howard Halle