Thomas Dane Gallery at Art Basel Hong Kong
Booth: 1C02
Private view: March 22
Vernissage: March 23
Public days: March 24-26
Glenn Ligon – ‘Strangers’ and ‘Mirrors’
New York artist Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) is one of the foremost artists working today and a distinctive voice of American culture. In most of his painting, work on paper, film or neon, Ligon appropriates text - borrowing passages from seminal contemporary and historical sources - to examine issues concerning race, authorship, gender and identity in America.Ligon’s favourite literary source is the distinguished African American novelist and social critic, James Baldwin, whose 1953 essay Stranger in the Village has spawned the famous series entitled ‘Stranger’, ‘Mirror’, ‘Figure’ and ‘Masquerade’.
Baldwin’s essay recounts the author’s experience of staying in a remote Swiss village. The other inhabitants of the village, having never seen an African American before, treat him with a distant curiosity, more as an object than a person, which Baldwin likened to the African American experience at home in his native USA.
Ligon has explained his fondness for this specific text: ‘The gravity and weight and panoramic nature of that work inspired me.’ He applies the letters to canvas or paper using stencils, often with a combination of materials including oil stick, gesso, coal dust and even glue.
During the stenciling process, Ligon allows imperfections and accidents to occur so that the words become more and more illegible. The result is that the text increasingly becomes an abstract surface, addressing language's inability to fully articulate experience, while also extending its reach from a literal signifier into a realm of emotive and abstract expression.
For Ligon, ‘there are a lot of things in our culture that seem clear, but … what the paintings are trying to do is to slow down reading, to present a difficulty, to present something that is not so easily consumed and clear.’