Glenn Ligon
Untitled #7, 2023
- Medium
- Carbon and graphite on Kozo paper
- Dimensions
- 45.7 x 30.5 cm
Joseph Clark Collection · JCC-0054
About the work
Carbon and graphite give Untitled #7 a material vocabulary of dark marks and changing density. The Kozo paper remains an active counterpart to those marks, shaping the experience of the surface. Made in 2023, the drawing can be approached within Glenn Ligon’s wider attention to the relationship between seeing and reading, and to the ways a work can reveal or withhold information.
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.