For several decades Ligon has worked primarily with text, making paintings, prints, and installations that encourage an oscillation between reading and looking. In his newest work he has created large-scale collages that hover between figuration and abstraction. Using a de Kooning painting as a compositional template, Ligon has created newspaper collages that were then enlarged digitally, cut up and reassembled into dense, multi-layered images. These new works continue an investigation in Ligon’s work of the limits of legibility and the use of pre-existing material in the production of new imagery.
Glenn Ligon lives and works in New York. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University in 1982, and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1985. A mid-career retrospective of Ligon's work, titled Glenn Ligon: AMERICA, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in March 2011, and traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Ligon has also had solo museum exhibitions at the Power Plant, Toronto (2005), the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001), the Kunstverein Munich (2001), the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2000), Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (1998), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1996), the Brooklyn Museum of Art (1996), and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (1993).
New York City, NY; NYC