"I became acutely aware of my own body as I stepped into Hauser & Wirth on a particularly frigid afternoon in January and met a blast of that stifling, artificial warmth. Even as I was thawing out, a chill ran through me as I peered at a selection of works on paper by Glenn Ligon. I was swallowed up in the pits of blue."
"As my gaze cascaded over these resplendent works, I was drawn immediately to "Blue (for JB) #18" (2025). Made of carbon ink and acrylic layered atop a pulp-based torinoko paper, it is almost purely abstract, save for the faint outline of black letters blotting the deep cerulean surface. A mass of a darker cobalt blue unfolds simultaneously across the paper, twisting, turning, and sprouting into a network of black and blue bulbs."
Glenn Ligon’s new two-part solo exhibition investigates how language and color merge to produce figuration from abstraction. Works on paper employ carbon ink and acrylic layered on pulp-based torinoko paper to create deep cerulean and cobalt masses punctuated by faint black letters. Blue (for JB) #18 pairs near-pure abstraction with textual remnants that suggest emergent figures and recall Lorna Simpson’s imagery, including a central lounging woman. The works foreground perception’s role in conjuring forms and probe abstraction’s formal possibilities and limitations, particularly as they intersect with racialized dimensions. The exhibition title derives from a 1964 observation about vision filtered through leaves.
Read at Hyperallergic
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