Golgatha is situated in a grove alongside three other sculptures made of marble or limestone. Together, they represent some of Storm King’s earliest acquisitions, having entered the collection in the 1960s. Alfred Hrdlicka is one of several Austrian artists represented at Storm King, including Fritz Wotruba, who was Hrdlicka’s teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna from 1953 to 1957. 

Hrdlicka insisted on using his artistic tools to expressive, rather than formal or naturalistic, ends. Concentrating on the male figure, predominantly the torso, he developed a “body language” based on expressive contortions and sagging flesh—a vocabulary he had studied in bars and meat markets, where he worked to earn a living while studying at the academy. The figure in Golgatha is typical of Hrdlicka’s style at the time this sculpture was made, its limp muscles suggesting that the body is no longer alive. The work takes its name from a hill outside Jerusalem, a biblical reference to the site of the Crucifixion.