Leon Golub Powerplay : The Political Portraits

‘Leon Golub Powerplay: The Political Portraits,’ curated by Jon Bird at London’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG), comprised a selection of Golub’s political portraits of men of power produced between 1976-78 and numbering well over one hundred individuals in the series. This was the first exhibition of examples of this significant body of works in the UK. The project developed from a room of portraits that Bird included in the 2011 Golub retrospective he curated for the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid (Bird, 2011a). At the NPG examples from the Reina Sofia exhibition were included (eg. ‘Franco’ and ‘Castro’), supplemented by works never previously exhibited, including the portrait of Michael Foot, the only British leader in the series. The selection of eighteen portraits was arranged across the wall used for the NPG’s ‘Intervention’ series and positioned in relation to the permanent collection. Its focal point was Golub’s single image of a religious leader, ‘Pope Paul IV’. Bird had the wall painted in Golub’s signature red oxide, the ground colour used throughout his iconic 1980s scenes of ‘Mercenaries’, Interrogations’ and ‘Riots’. The specificities of facial expression became increasingly central to Golub’s form of expressive realism following from his paintings of battling groups derived from the antique (the ‘Gigantomachies’), to the three wall-sized ‘Vietnam’ paintings of the mid-1970s (Bird, 2011b). Through the exhibition, Bird sought to demonstrate Golub’s attention to the mediated ‘look of power,’ a key element in the artist’s pictorial language. This was further explored in the book, ‘Leon Golub Powerplay’ (2016), with essays by Bird and Gill Perry, which provided the first and most complete visual documentation of the Political Portraits, all with brief explanatory texts provided by Bird. Bird also wrote the exhibition guide and explanatory wall texts that guided visitors through the display.

The American artist Leon Golub (1922–2004) is best known for his iconic history paintings of mercenaries, interrogations, torture scenes and riots of the 1980s and early ’90s. In 2016 Jon Bird curated an exhibition of Golub's political portraits at the National Portrait Gallery and published an accompanying book, which explores the effects of power upon the body through facial expressions, gestures and poses, and invested his figures with psychological tension and depth.
Leon Golub powerplay : the political portraits has two components
(1) Leon Golub powerplay: the political portraits (2016). [Show/Exhibition]
Lead curator of Leon Golub powerplay exhibition of his political portraits.
(2) Leon Golub powerplay: the political portraits (2016). [Book]
This book accompanies the exhibition of Leon Golub’s political portraits.