Glenn Ligon: What We Said the Last Time at Luhring Augustine

Luhring Augustine is pleased to present What We Said The Last Time, an exhibition of new work by Glenn Ligon, and Entanglements, a curatorial project by the artist. A companion exhibition entitled We Need To Wake Up Cause That’s What Time It Is opened at Luhring Augustine Bushwick on January 16th and remains on view through April 17, 2016.

What We Said The Last Time features a suite of seventeen inkjet prints that document the paint-spattered pages of the artist’s well-worn copy of James Baldwin’s seminal 1953 essay “Stranger in the Village.” Written during a stay in a remote Swiss mountain hamlet, Baldwin’s text examines complex and urgent questions around blackness, culture, and history. Since 1996, Ligon has used the essay as the basis of his “Stranger” series, including prints, drawings, and dense paintings made with oil stick and often coal dust that oscillate between legibility and obscurity. While creating these canvases, Ligon kept pages of Baldwin’s essay on his studio table for reference, and over the years they became covered with random smudges of black paint, oil stains, and fingerprints. Intrigued by this accumulation of marks, Ligon transformed the book pages into a suite of large-scale prints, using the full text of the essay for the first time in his career. The resulting work is a palimpsest of accumulated personal histories that suggests Ligon’s long engagement with Baldwin’s essay, as well as a new strategy in his ongoing exploration of the interplay between language and abstraction.

Gallery is open Thuesday-Saturday