Leon Golub: Bite Your Tongue / Pascale Marthine Tayou: Boomerang, Serpentine Galleries - exhibition review

Leon Golub: Bite Your Tongue, Serpentine Gallery ★★★

Pascale Marthine Tayou: Boomerang, Serpentine Sackler Gallery ★★★

Deep political convictions fill both the Serpentines this spring, but the way the two artists have gone about exploring them couldn’t be more different.

Golub’s paintings embody their weighty subject matter in seemingly every brush mark. The late American painter hit his stride with a series of anti-war paintings in the Sixties. Initially they were generalistic, but soon they explicitly drew on the horrors of Vietnam: the Napalm series is painted on pieces of raw canvas cut savagely into uneven shapes. They’re like the residue of conflict, as if scorched or stained with blood.

This unflinching work continued in the Eighties, where, in protest against US counter-insurgencies, Golub made the vast Mercenaries and Interrogation series — images of potent threat and violence, like White Squad (El Salvador). These remain Golub’s strongest paintings.

The colourful cheeriness of Tayou’s works, meanwhile, belies their troubling subject matter, from pollution to Africa’s colonial history. Africonda greets you as you enter; a candy-coloured ball formed from a coiled cloth snake. Tayou, a Belgian-based Cameroonian, calls it “deceitfully joyful”, though, because it symbolises mankind, chasing its own tail. Tayou’s work can feel slight but he carries most of it off with admirable exuberance.

Until May 17 (020 7402 6075, serpentinegalleries.org)