GLENN LIGON
Hauser & Wirth presents an exhibition by the artist Glenn Ligon. The display includes a continuation of his Stranger paintings, a new abstract painting series titled Static, and a series of untitled drawings on Kozo paper.
March 25 – May 11, 2024
‘Stranger #98’ (2023) is from Ligon’s Stranger paintings, his longest running series, which first began in 1997 and renders excerpts from James Baldwin’s 1953 essay, ‘Stranger in the Village.’ In the text, Baldwin recounts his experience of visiting the small mountain village of Leukerbad, Switzerland, where he encountered villagers who had never met a Black man before him.
In the Stranger series, Ligon stencils text onto the canvas with oil stick, creating a relief made of sentences. As the stencil is moved across the canvas, oil stick residue and smudges from previous words mark the canvas, obscuring some of the text. The text is further abstracted by the addition of coal dust—a black, gravel like waste product of coal mining—to the surface of the painting.
Through the work’s varying degrees of legibility, Ligon evokes both hypervisibility and invisibility in the Black experience and explores language’s inability to fully articulate issues surrounding race, citizenship and subjecthood. As Ligon remarks, ‘The essay is not only about race relations but about what it means to be a stranger anywhere.’
The new Static series sees Ligon building on this technique but to more abstract ends. Like his Stranger paintings, Ligon stencils excerpts from Baldwin’s text; however, here he uses white oil stick on a white gesso ground, subsequently rubbing black oil stick on the raised forms. In applying pigment to the overlapping layers of letters, the artist creates different degrees of abstraction and emphases their illegibility.
Similarly in his untitled works on paper, Ligon pushes the limits of abstraction by employing the traditional rubbing technique of frottage. Using a single Stranger paintings as a textured surface on which Kozo paper is placed, the artist rubs carbon and graphite to translate the blurred text from canvas to paper.
The spontaneous forms that emerge build upon the idea of ‘improvisational abstraction,’ which is central to the artist’s practice, exploring the tension between accident and intention, conscious and subconscious.