GLENN LIGON

The exhibition’s title is taken from Baldwin’s 1964 introduction to a Beauford Delaney exhibition and recalls the writer’s reflection on a window through which ‘everything one saw... was filtered through leaves.’ Ligon draws upon Baldwin’s description of light ‘as blue as the blues when the last light of sun departed,’ to consider how color and language can merge to create a kind of figuration. In these new works, blue operates as more than a color; it conveys mood, time and emotion. It evokes the twilight hour between visibility and darkness; it conjures the emotional register of Blues music. For Ligon, as for Baldwin, light becomes a metaphor for perception itself, a means of reckoning with history, intimacy and the power of art to reveal quieter truths.

In the front gallery at 18th Street, Ligon presents ‘Blue (for JB),’ a new series of large-scale works on paper that build on ideas first explored in his Stranger paintings, text-based works drawn from Baldwin’s 1953 essay ‘Stranger in the Village.’ For this new body of work, Ligon begins with rubbings made on thin sheets of Japanese Kozo paper placed atop studies he made for his Stranger paintings. This process leaves behind traces of word fragments and shapes that record the convergence of image and text. Ligon then enlarges these rubbings as silkscreens on blue grounds and applies water to the surfaces, allowing the ink to flow and blur across the paper. The resulting works oscillate between legibility and abstraction, transforming Baldwin’s words into something atmospheric and enveloping.

The second gallery features prints made over the past three decades, charting the development of Ligon’s printmaking practice from the early 1990s to today. Among the works on view are ‘Untitled (Four Etchings)’ (1992), a suite of four prints using text from prominent Black authors Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison; ‘Self-Portrait at Nine Years Old’ (2008), from a series where Ligon used images of his childhood music idols, like Stevie Wonder and James Brown, to represent himself through techniques like pulp painting and screen printing; and ‘Untitled (Condition Report for Black Rage)’ (2015), a silkscreen and digital print featuring a marked-up image of the cover of the seminal 1968 book ‘Black Rage.’ Taken together with the new works in the front gallery, this presentation underscores the breadth of Ligon’s engagement with different media and reveals how, across decades, he has used printmaking to test the limits of language and representation.

Courtesy Hauser & Wirth