Exhibition in New York places the brutality of Leon Golub’s paintings in dialogue with contemporary artists

Leon Golub was not a tastemaker, unlike Rashid Johnson, who is. Both came to New York from Chicago, but apart from their different generations (Golub died in 2004 at 82, Johnson is 46), you would be hard-pressed to find two artists whose sensibilities were more divergent.

Johnson, a multidisciplinary artist who impressed from the start, sends the elements of black middle-class domesticity through the windmills of your mind. Golub, an intensely expressionist painter who largely flew under the radar, shoves the pain and, most disturbingly, the glory of unbridled violence in your face.

Yet this month, as intractable conflicts rage around the world, the two will occupy the same gallery And in Arcadia Egoa topical, two-part season opener Johnson curated for Hauser & Wirth in Chelsea with his own curator Kate Fowle. The Latin title is scratched into Golub’s 1997 canvas The time is up: “I am also in paradise.” The speaker is Death.

According to filmmaker Charlie Ahearn, whose 2003 video portrait of the artist and his wife, feminist painter Nancy Spero, captures Golub’s full personality and art, “Leon put the words ‘Guaranteed Collector’ on some of his paintings because everyone was afraid of him.”

That was a joke, but the politically active Golub wanted to be disruptive, a quality shared by the eight artists Johnson has included, along with himself, in a thematic group show that accompanies a solo presentation of Golub’s visceral paintings. “It can be a dangerous game to create parallels between our works,” Johnson warns. “This is much more about amplifying Golub.”

Yet there are parallels. Golub has been a touchstone for the conceptually minded Johnson since his days as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “They had huge murals of Golub in the Art Institute, and when you grow up in a city with one encyclopedic institution, you accept its presentation as canonical,” Johnson recalls. “It wasn’t until I moved to New York that I realized he wasn’t that well-known.”

Part of this was due to Golub’s uncomfortable subject matter: the morally, physically, and psychologically compromised method of resolving conflict through war and terror. Golub’s flayed representations of torture by mercenaries, government soldiers, armed thugs, snarling dogs, and tyrants, painted on unprimed and unframed canvas on an epic scale, were deliberately punitive.

“He was exuberant,” says Ahearn, whose feature film, Wild Style, woke up the world to graffiti art and hip-hop in 1970s New York. “And he was very involved in the politics of the time. He got emotional about it. He was proud of the brutality and primitiveness in his work, not because he thought male power was great, but as a critique of it – as a complaint.”

He was a maverick in other ways, too, a one-man show for Human Rights Watch who continued to paint figures as Abstract Expressionism and then Pop, Minimalism, and early Conceptualism gained popularity, bringing meat cleaver and paintbrush to his already painful scenes of conflict, both external and internal. His work anticipated the Neo-Expressionism of the 1980s, when he was more widely known but more present in institutions than in the marketplace.

Golub’s enormous paintings – he called several of them “Gigantimachies” – remained too crude and out of keeping with prevailing taste to appeal even to audiences for, say, Philip Guston, whose depictions of racism, fascism and outright evil covered similar ground but were, at least superficially, more palatable.

A Guston is featured in the gallery’s group show, which includes several works by other artists who use masks. (Johnson contributed one and commissioned another from Tiona Nekkia McClodden, one of several younger artists he has supported.) “Masks are present in Golub’s practice,” Johnson points out. “The group show is not meant to mirror that, but to unpack his critical and aesthetic concerns, such as the idea of ​​how to examine violence.”

Teresa Margolles does. Her sculpture, a bloodied sofa, embodies the aftermath of murderous depredations by Mexican drug cartels. But the curator at Johnson was determined to highlight an additional theme of transition, not just from life to death but also in the “radical turn” that Golub and Guston made in their work, as did the poet and playwright LeRoi Jones, when he became Amiri Baraka. (The show includes texts by Baraka, Samuel Beckett, and Percival Everett that explore sensitive pauses between thought and action.)

“Some works are just about transition,” Johnson told me. In Free from fatDavid Hammons’ mid-’90s video features the artist kicking a bucket down a dark, empty city street; what initially sounds like gunfire slowly morphs into rhythmic drumming. “I was thinking about these in-between spaces,” Johnson added. “That kind of waiting and pausing is what you see in Golub’s work. The brutality of it attracts a certain audience, but there can and should be opportunities to bring people into that space and be challenged by difficult themes. I think these works can begin that process.”

• Leon Golub: Et In Arcadia Ego. Created by Rashid Johnson, September 5-October 19, Hauser & Wirth, 542 West 22nd Street, New York