Welgemeend August Art Month - 2019

49 ALEXANDER PODLASHUC Cattle Auction in Leeuwaarden 1992 signed and dated 1986 oil on canvas 100 x 120 cm Podlashuc Collection “Pod was fascinated and horrified by the ease in which people could be dominated and subjugated despite their best efforts to resist. From settler-colonisation to Auschwitz, Beirut to Iraq, Myanmar to Soweto, he saw a continual process of sustained violence and murder underpinning modernity that somehow proceeded unchecked and unjudged. One of the keys to this he felt lay in howTrust and Faith in Authority are conscripted to fill the abattoir. Many of his images play on this tension: here we have docile, possibly even proud cows, being taken to slaughter, following faithfully the jaundice-eyed farmer across a field of blood. Structural power is never to be trusted.” Leo Podlashuc