Print Prerogative gallery visit: Leon Golub (1922-2004) and Nancy Spero (1926-2009): the Jon Bird Gift
At British Museum Prints and Drawings.

Brilliant small exhibition of works on paper by Leon Golub and Nancy Spero. The works, which include etchings, screen prints, lithographs, hectographs, woodcuts with collage, and drawings, demonstrate Golub and Spero’s commitment to consciousness raising around issues of social injustice, violence, imperialism, sexism and racism. Their engagement with print does not appear subordinated to their painting practices, but rather serving as another arena in which they have experimented with texture, colour, form, repetition, and symbology in fascinating ways. Golub’s use of figuration appears as if mediated through theological, Jewish-mystical planes of visual understanding. The violence of processes like etching into metal with acid and printing onto paper with immense pressures (which would easily crush a human skull) often seem distant and incidental in print works - but here they seem to interact with the sense of immediacy and brutalisation found in Golub’s paintings and with Golub and Spero’s general preoccupations with brutality, authority, belligerence, and power.

Words by @descend_from_yr_barren_throne

Images:

1. Leon Golub, ‘Gestures II’, 1949-50.
Colour etching and aquatint.

2. Leon Golub, ‘The Reading of the Law II’, 1949-50.
Etching and aquatint with hand-colouring.

3. Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, ‘They Will Torture You, My Friend’, 1971.
Colour screenprint and photo screenprint.

4. Leon Golub, ‘South Africa’, 1985.
Colour lithograph with screenprint.

5. Nancy Spero, ‘The Burp’, 1948.
Hectograph.

6. Nancy Spero ‘Le Cimetière
(The Cemetery)’, 1993.
Hand-printed woodblock with collage on indigo-blue dyed paper

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