Glenn Ligon
04 Feb - 11 Mar 2006
GLENN LIGON
"We Had Everything Before Us. We Had Nothing Before Us."
Yvon Lambert is pleased to announce the exhibition We Had Everything Before Us - We Had Nothing Before Us by Glenn Ligon from February 4 to March 11, 2006.
For his first solo exhibition at the gallery the artist will present a series of ten new paintings, based on the work, “Mirror,” 2002, which was one of eight coaldust text paintings included in Documenta XI in Kassel, Germany in 2002. All of the text in those paintings was from the James Baldwin essay “Stranger in the Village,” which was originally published in 1953. Written more than a half century ago, the essay anticipates many of the current debates around immigration, assimilation and citizenship.
In the early fifties James Baldwin had gone to a tiny village in the Swiss Alps to work on a novel and observed that for many of the villagers he was the first black man they had ever seen. Using this fact as the basis of the essay, he explored what it means to be a “stranger”. The text in the paintings is a passage in Baldwin’s essay where he describes the villagers’ fascination with the texture of his hair and the color of his skin. The villagers’ eyes act as a mirror in which he sees himself, but it is a mirror that, in the end, reflects only what the villagers imagine him to be. (text deleted here) The text in the paintings is almost impossible to read, which is a reflection of the difficulty of any attempt to approach the “other” and a meditation on the failure of language.
Glenn Ligon is at the forefront of a generation of artists who came to prominence in the late 1980s on the strength of conceptually based paintings and photo-text work whose subjects investigate the social, linguistic, and political constructions of race, gender, and sexuality. Glenn Ligon’s pratice, which incorporates sources as diverse as James Baldwin’s literary texts and Richard Pryor’s stand-up comedy routines, encompasses painting, printmaking, sculpture, installation, and video. Glenn Ligon’s art is a sustained meditation on issues of quotation, the presence of the past in the present, and the representation of self in relation to culture and history. Painting is the key tool for Ligon’s trade in ideas, especially those informed by modernist aesthetics and the inconsistencies of comprehending society’s and the media’s take on the black body politic. Ligon’s appropriated historical fragments are transferred repeatedly and poignantly between works produced in different media, but invariably find themselves reconstituted and transformed again in Ligon’s painting.
Glenn Ligon : Some Changes
The Power Plant has organised the world premiere of a major touring exhibition of the work of Glenn Ligon : Some Changes, co-curated by Wayne Baerwaldt, Director, The Power Plant, and Thelma Golden, Deputy Director, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Some Changes surveys the breadth of Ligon’s oeuvre over the last seventeen years and provides a rare opportunity to view a significant body of the artist’s works, spanning from 1988 to the present. These include Untitled (I Am A Man) (1988); Runaways (1993); the Richard Pryor paintings (1993-2004); the awardwinning web-based project, Annotations (2003); and the installation The Orange and Blue Feelings (2003) among others.
This important exhibition opened at The Power Plant in Toronto, Canada and then travels to major exhibition centres in the United States and Europe through 2007 : Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (January to April 2006); the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (September 30 to December 31, 2006); the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (January 27 to April 22, 2007) and Mudam - Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg (October 6 to December 17, 2007). To coincide with the touring exhibition, The Power Plant has published the first significant monograph on Ligon’s work written by Mark Nash, Wayne Koestenbaum, Huey Copeland and Darby English. Glenn Ligon’s work has appeared in Documenta XI, Kassel (2002); the XXIV Bienal de Sao Paulo (1998) and the Venice Biennale (1997). His extensive exhibition history includes solo shows at Kunstverein Munich (2001), the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2000), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1996), and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. (1993). His work has been included in important group exhibitions such as Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated), the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2004); The American Century: Art and Culture 1900-2000, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1994) and London ICA and Dark O’Clock, Museum of Modern Art, Sao Paulo and Plug In Inc., Winnipeg (1994).
© Glenn Ligon
"We Had Everything Before Us. We Had Nothing Before Us."
Yvon Lambert is pleased to announce the exhibition We Had Everything Before Us - We Had Nothing Before Us by Glenn Ligon from February 4 to March 11, 2006.
For his first solo exhibition at the gallery the artist will present a series of ten new paintings, based on the work, “Mirror,” 2002, which was one of eight coaldust text paintings included in Documenta XI in Kassel, Germany in 2002. All of the text in those paintings was from the James Baldwin essay “Stranger in the Village,” which was originally published in 1953. Written more than a half century ago, the essay anticipates many of the current debates around immigration, assimilation and citizenship.
In the early fifties James Baldwin had gone to a tiny village in the Swiss Alps to work on a novel and observed that for many of the villagers he was the first black man they had ever seen. Using this fact as the basis of the essay, he explored what it means to be a “stranger”. The text in the paintings is a passage in Baldwin’s essay where he describes the villagers’ fascination with the texture of his hair and the color of his skin. The villagers’ eyes act as a mirror in which he sees himself, but it is a mirror that, in the end, reflects only what the villagers imagine him to be. (text deleted here) The text in the paintings is almost impossible to read, which is a reflection of the difficulty of any attempt to approach the “other” and a meditation on the failure of language.
Glenn Ligon is at the forefront of a generation of artists who came to prominence in the late 1980s on the strength of conceptually based paintings and photo-text work whose subjects investigate the social, linguistic, and political constructions of race, gender, and sexuality. Glenn Ligon’s pratice, which incorporates sources as diverse as James Baldwin’s literary texts and Richard Pryor’s stand-up comedy routines, encompasses painting, printmaking, sculpture, installation, and video. Glenn Ligon’s art is a sustained meditation on issues of quotation, the presence of the past in the present, and the representation of self in relation to culture and history. Painting is the key tool for Ligon’s trade in ideas, especially those informed by modernist aesthetics and the inconsistencies of comprehending society’s and the media’s take on the black body politic. Ligon’s appropriated historical fragments are transferred repeatedly and poignantly between works produced in different media, but invariably find themselves reconstituted and transformed again in Ligon’s painting.
Glenn Ligon : Some Changes
The Power Plant has organised the world premiere of a major touring exhibition of the work of Glenn Ligon : Some Changes, co-curated by Wayne Baerwaldt, Director, The Power Plant, and Thelma Golden, Deputy Director, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Some Changes surveys the breadth of Ligon’s oeuvre over the last seventeen years and provides a rare opportunity to view a significant body of the artist’s works, spanning from 1988 to the present. These include Untitled (I Am A Man) (1988); Runaways (1993); the Richard Pryor paintings (1993-2004); the awardwinning web-based project, Annotations (2003); and the installation The Orange and Blue Feelings (2003) among others.
This important exhibition opened at The Power Plant in Toronto, Canada and then travels to major exhibition centres in the United States and Europe through 2007 : Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (January to April 2006); the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (September 30 to December 31, 2006); the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (January 27 to April 22, 2007) and Mudam - Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg (October 6 to December 17, 2007). To coincide with the touring exhibition, The Power Plant has published the first significant monograph on Ligon’s work written by Mark Nash, Wayne Koestenbaum, Huey Copeland and Darby English. Glenn Ligon’s work has appeared in Documenta XI, Kassel (2002); the XXIV Bienal de Sao Paulo (1998) and the Venice Biennale (1997). His extensive exhibition history includes solo shows at Kunstverein Munich (2001), the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2000), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1996), and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. (1993). His work has been included in important group exhibitions such as Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated), the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2004); The American Century: Art and Culture 1900-2000, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1994) and London ICA and Dark O’Clock, Museum of Modern Art, Sao Paulo and Plug In Inc., Winnipeg (1994).
© Glenn Ligon