GLENN LIGON
LOVE AND THEFT
March 22, 2008 - May 31, 2008
Power House Memphis is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Glenn Ligon that include a series of new black and gold paintings, a new neon work, a wallpaper installation, and a set of prints based on his painting 'Untitled (I am a Man)' made by the artist in the late eighties that was based on the iconic signs carried by striking sanitation workers in Memphis on March 28th 1968.
We are delighted that the artist has accepted the invitation to show these new works at Power House Memphis, which is near the Civil Rights Museum in downtown Memphis. Glenn Ligon is at the forefront of a generation of artists who came to prominence in the late 1980s with conceptually based work that investigates the social, linguistic, and political constructions of race, gender, and sexuality. His art is a meditation on issues of quotation, the presence of the past in the present, and the representation of the self in relation to culture and history.
Glenn Ligon is an American conceptual artist who is best known for his large, text-based paintings in which a chosen phrase is repeated over and over. This exhibition will present a series of Richard Pryor joke paintings with black text on gold-backgrounds. The jokes were transcribed from comedy albums that Pryor recorded for Partee Records, a division of Memphis based Stax records.
In 1993, Ligon began the first of three series of paintings based on Richard Pryor's groundbreaking stand-up comedy routines from the 1970s. The scatological and racially charged jokes Ligon depicts speak in the vernacular language of the street and reveal a complex and nuanced vision of American culture.
“It is central to their deconstructive force, rather than trivial, that Ligon re-presents Pryor's jokes as statements lodged between the verbal and the visual, the perceptual and conceptual – in effect, between the scene of the myth and that of its possible verification. Pryor's joke purports but fails to make visible what can exist only in fantasy, and Ligon’s paintings literally realize this, monumentalizing the necessary failure at the joke’s core.” - Darby English
Also included at Power House Memphis are four other major works: a black painted neon piece that flickers off and on and spells out the word “America.” A wallpaper installation that uses a fragment of an image from Andy Warhol’s appropriation of a photo of a civil rights march. A set of prints called 'Condition Report' [2000] , which examine the aging of the 'Untitled (I am a Man)' painting.
Glenn Ligon lives and works in New York and his work is in the collections of museums worldwide. Recently he had a major survey show 'Glenn Ligon - Some Changes' curated by Wayne Baerwaldt and Thelma Golden that toured museums worldwide from 2005 - 2008 : it opened at the Power Plant in Toronto in June 2005 and traveled to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh; Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston; Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus; Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver, and finished at the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg. The associated catalogue: 'Glenn Ligon – Some Changes' is an outstanding publication with illustrated works and essays [The Power Plant, Toronto 2005]
All works in the exhibition courtesy the artist Glenn Ligon and Regen Projects 9016 Santa Monica Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90069 Tel. (310) 276-5424 Fax. (310) 276-7430 www.regenprojects.com