Beschreibung:

196 Glenn Ligon Follow The Future #1 signed, titled and dated '"The Future #1" 2004 Glenn Ligon Glenn Ligon' on the upper turnover edge oilstick and acrylic on canvas 81.3 x 81.3 cm (32 x 32 in.) Executed in 2004.
Provenance Regen Projects, Los Angeles Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2005 Catalogue Essay In a 2008 alphabetical and somewhat autobiographical glossary Glenn Ligon wrote for the catalogue of the exhibition 30 Americans, the letter H stands for “happens to be black.” Ligon expands the interpretation in writing “I happens to be black too, though I don’t know how it happened. Because I never felt I was in a position to choose my racial identity, it never occurred to me that blackness was something that could happen to you, like being mugged or winning the lottery. I though one was just black and that was that.” Almost two decades earlier, however, in his important 1991 series of works entitled “I remember the very day that I became colored…,” Ligon not only broadcast the continuing question of identity for himself, but for the many brilliantly talented and perceptive African American artists to follow. From that moment forward until today, while differing paths have been taken, including in certain instances the brilliant continued development of abstraction, we are looking at an exciting and increasingly powerful signature of a growing number of American artists who both happen to be African American as well as those who look deeply into their blackness and/or black culture to create exceptional works of art. What we have witnessed in the last three decades is no less than a truly dynamic reshuffling of the American art world. And what we have more recently experienced is an even greater reassignment of the value placed upon these black artists (primarily but not exclusively American) by the art market. Spanning a period of 17 years from the 1991 “I remember the very day” by Glenn Ligon through Mickalene Thomas’ “America the Beautiful” in 2008, these brilliantly articulate artists -- also including Kara Walker, Wangechi Mutu, Gary Simmons Henry Taylor and Julie Mehretu -- have produced these eight highly engaging works of art, each of which expresses alternative definitions to anyone’s standard art glossary. African American artists of the decade bracketing the new century shared a new world. “They are influenced by hip hop, alt rock, new media, suburban angst, urban blight, globalism, and the Internet - the felicitous device of international communication and new optimism in the wake of the initial postmodern urge to define the avant-garde as dead. They live in a world where their particular cultural specificity is marketed to the planet and sold back to them,” wrote Thelma Golden in the catalogue of her Freestyle exhibition at the Studio Museum in 2001. “As a group, they exemplify the presence of art school training in that they create work that refers to multiple histories of contemporary art and culture -- both non-Western and that of the Western modernist tradition... They are both post-Basquiat and post-Biggie. They embrace the dichotomies of high and low, inside and outside, tradition and innovation with a great ease and facility. Like the generations before them, they resist narrow definition. Most importantly, their work, in all of its various forms, speaks to an individual freedom that is a result of this transitional moment in the quest to define on-going changes in the evolution of African-American art and ultimately to on-going redefinition of blackness in contemporary culture.” Understanding the nature of the work by three of these seven artists provides both visual and intellectual access to the racial and identity issues with which six of these exceptional artists are purposefully concerned and engaged. The seventh, Julie Mehretu has gained international recognition in gloriously articulating new abstraction into the 21st century. Kara Walker’s important early work 1994 “Untitled” takes the typical 19th and early 20th century black paper silhouette genre and enlarges and imbues it with the often degrading interaction in the antebellum South between the black slave or slaves and one or more wh