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Rat Hole Gallery
5-5-3-B1 Minami Aoyama
Minato-ku
Tokyo 107-0062 Japan   map * 
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Glenn Ligon Solo Exhibition
by Rat Hole Gallery
Location: Rat Hole Gallery
Artist(s): Glenn LIGON
Date: 29 Mar - 30 Jun 2013

Rat Hole Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of New York-based artist Glenn Ligon on view. The exhibition will present a suite of new paintings, neon sculptures, and drawings, and marks the first time for Ligon’s work to be shown in Japan.

Born in 1960 in the Bronx, New York, Glenn Ligon has an artistic practice that encompasses painting, neon, printmaking, photography, installation, and video. Reflecting social and personal histories, Ligon’s work often addresses issues of race, sexuality, and identity, while building critically on the legacies of modern painting and conceptual art. Engaging in an acute investigation of American history and culture, Ligon uses text, language, and imagery from a wide range of sources, from the literary works of writers such as James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gertrude Stein, to stand-up comedy routines, children’s coloring books, and slave narratives.

While Ligon works across a wide range of mediums, he is best known for his landmark series of text-based paintings made since the late 1980s. These abstract works are painted with repeated stencils in black oil stick, with each overlapping layer causing the letters on the canvas to rise and thicken with excess paint, becoming increasingly smudged and illegible. The large-scale text paintings in the exhibition are from Ligon’s Stranger series, which draws on excerpts from James Baldwin’s 1953 essay “Stranger in the Village” about the author’s experience as an African-American visiting a small village in Switzerland. These paintings are flocked with layers of coal dust, which add texture and glitter to the canvas, as well an element of contrast and contradiction between the beauty of coal dust as a black shiny material in relation to it being a waste product leftover from coal processing.

The exhibition will also feature several small-scale drawings produced with oil stick and coal dust, which repeat the phrase “negro sunshine,” a fragment of text from Gertude Stein’s 1909 novel “Three Lives.” In both Ligon’s paintings and works on paper, the appropriated text is transformed into abstract compositions, creating a dialogue between visibility and erasure and between the artist’s use of formal elements (such as the monochrome palette, stencil lettering, and repetition of text) and the emotional narrative. In addition, they exemplify Ligon’s interest in the force of language, the multiplicities of meanings across generations, and shifting notions of identity and the self in relation to culture and history.

Since 2005, Ligon has produced neon works that also employ quotes from historical writings or isolate a single word or phrase. These neon reliefs are painted with black on the front of the letters so that the light of the neon appears against the wall, creating a luminous haze of light behind the black letters that face the viewer. Presented in the exhibition will be two neon works: Double America (2012), which continues a series of works using the word “America” and Untitled (Orpheus and Eurydice) (2013), shown for the first time. Ligon’s neon sculptures present racial, social, and political complexities by embodying a metaphor between black and white, while at the same time play with the opposing notions of light and shadow, vision and non-seeing, and life and death.

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