This exhibition of the work of Leon Golub and Nancy Spero is done in conjunction with the Fine Arts Work Center's Distinguished Artist's Service Award of which they are this year's recipients.
When I was asked to curate this exhibition I took it as an opportunity to look thoroughly and deeply at the work of two artists whose work and person I have admired for 25 years. Both of these post-formalist artists make art that is rich symbolically and simultaneously reflects the historical real. Both artists speak through "the body inscribed" about the world in which they live. With virtuosity, anger and humor they have rendered the universal subject and still produced two of the most unique and recognizable styles in late 20th century art.
These 24 drawings by Leon Golub have never before been exhibited. Though they differ radically in scale from the paintings for which he is known, they form a succinct lexicon of the gigantic themes that have persisted for 50 years in his paintings. Brilliantly colored, spontaneously drawn these drawings range from the mythic and seemingly noble to the highly provocative and down right dirty. All however are exact metaphors for surfacings of the uncongenial unconscious and abuses of power that we experience today and that have persisted in human behavior throughout all recorded history. We witness in Golub's paintings and in the majority of these drawings a "deeply troubled masculine identity".
The work of Nancy Spero in this exhibition focuses on "the exhilaration of defiance", a theme seen continuously in her art over a period of 40 years. She is literally picturing what Jo Anna Isaak subsequently called (in an essay of the same name) "the revolutionary power of women's laughter". Spero has scavenged history for images of women showing great spirit and great physical courage in the face of duty, danger, abuse and ignor-ance. She has compiled a lexicon of about 300 historical images from sources as varied as erotic Greek vases, fertility sculptures, architectural friezes, contemporary media and cartoons. She configures and reconfigures these woman centric images to create stories and image sequences which are now indelibly associated with her strong feminist commitment. In this she has accomplished no less than a recovery of the female body as a site of humor, pleasure, strength and resistance.
Lauren Ewing, 2004
