Fighting Men exhibition draws media attention
Open gallery
Painter Leon Golub, ceramist Pete Voulkos, and cartoonist Jack Kirby offer “images of power, violence, and action while kicking against the constraints of their respective media” in Fighting Men, currently on exhibit at the Hoffman Gallery.
A recent review in the Oregonian notes “conspicuous similarities” between the artists, while singling out Golub’s paintings. “His subjects are uniformly arresting in their capacity to horrify and his painting—an accumulation of itchy daubs, not unlike camouflage—wires his figures with an awkward, off-kilter energy that suits their outsider status.”
Kirby, Golub, and Voulkos operated in different spheres of art history and discourse. Kirby innovated superhero comics brimming with an excess of balletic violence; Golub’s meditations on power and barbarity in modern man kept him in the margins of contemporary art until late in his career; and Voulkos transformed pottery into something sweaty, macho, and monumental.
Curated by Daniel Duford, Fighting Men will run through March 3, 2013; the Hoffman Gallery is open Tuesday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-4 p.m.
