Glenn Ligon
Extract, 2021
- Medium
- Aquatint with photogravure
- Dimensions
- 36.8 x 38.1 cm
- Edition
- Edition of 75 + 25 artist's proofs; image 11.4 x 15.2 cm; paper 36.8 x 38.1 cm
Joseph Clark Collection · JCC-0009
About the work
Extract brings together aquatint and photogravure, combining two ways of carrying tone and imagery onto paper. Its small image sits within a larger sheet, giving the surrounding space a role in the experience of looking. Published in 2021, the print belongs to Glenn Ligon’s sustained investigation of how images and language change through reproduction, and how meaning can emerge through both visibility and obscurity.
About the artist
Glenn Ligon (born New York, 1960) is an American artist whose paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, installations and neon works examine the relationships between language, history and identity. He studied at Wesleyan University and participated in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program.
Since the late 1980s, Ligon has drawn on literary texts, political speech and popular culture, including writing by James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Genet and performances by Richard Pryor. Repeated or obscured words become material surfaces, making the effort of reading part of the encounter. His work connects this formal process with the ways race and identity are made visible, categorised or overlooked.
The Whitney’s 2011 retrospective AMERICA brought together approximately one hundred works across media, placing his development within the histories of modern painting and conceptual art. The exhibition travelled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The three works in the Joseph Clark Collection, dated 1995, 2021 and 2023, offer different points of entry into his sustained investigation of language, surface and perception.