Leon Golub: Bite Your Tongue (VAULT Magazine, 2015)
Leon Golub, Bite Your Tongue Serpentine Gallery, Hyde Park, London, 2015. I first discovered Leon Golub’s paintings as an art student in the late 1970s, when I saw some of his pictures reproduced in a magazine. At that time his images of soldiers and other figures interested me but I felt somehow detached from them. After all, what experience did I yet have of other people’s inhumanity – or even my own? Television news reports of wars and invasions were still a fairly abstract background hum to my life at that early stage. It is only in the past few years, now that I am middle-aged, that I have had the opportunity to see Golub’s paintings in the flesh. With the added benefit of life experience, they now appear rich and significant, terrible and deeply tragic. They move me. This survey exhibition, Bite Your Tongue , at the Serpentine Gallery, is the first time that the artist’s work has been shown in London since 2000. The early works deal with myth...