Threnody II

One of the foremost contemporary figurative painters, Leon Golub painted visceral responses to atrocities committed as a result of dehumanizing political fanaticism. While his earlier work was a dark meditation on suffering, the turmoil of the 1960s, culminating in the Vietnam War, urged Golub to make his work less allegorical and more explicitly responsive to current events. His subject matter increasingly became the violent, hidden side of the daily news and an indictment against the abuse of power. Golub has suggested that looking at his paintings is like looking into a mirror - that anyone, in certain circumstances, can revert to appalling violence. Golub rose to artistic prominence in the 1980s with brutal series such as "Mercenaries" and "Interrogation." Female figures, notably absent from his work until this point, became the focus of the "Threnody" (a song of lamentation) series. Veering from his often shocking depictions of torture and murder to a quieter yet still chilling pathos, Golub used the mourning women, aged and poor, as a symbol of powerlessness. In this work, the women gesture wildly in a ritualized mourning dance, and the flattened space and absence of shadows confine the figures in a "non-space" with nowhere to escape. The haunting strangeness of "Threnody II" transcends the conventions of protest art while still addressing the historical realities of oppression and exclusion.