Tag: Male Author

The exhibition overall eludes life-affirming quality, and gravitas. There’s a telos around surrender. Untamed bodies. A lot about placement of bodies in space, and leaping. They feel chimerical, but grounded in the present and in that regard tie together well. I don’t think there’s a narrative to the show. The painting technique feels raw, a sensual relationship to painting. Thick...

The painting as a whole is but a cropped view, a three-quarters shot revealing an arrangement of characters forming a scene. They are close enough to each other for dialogue, which as a beholder commands our attention toward the posture of their bodies both as standalone figures and as a cohort. Real people and real emotions involved. Experience is always...

Insights on the condition of being an artist, the reasons why an artist is compelled to live, and cannot settle. That choices are made consciously and necessarily for oneself. Distrust of words with an imprecise meaning, and why. Intimate knowledge that a promise unfulfilled is not an option, cannot be an end in itself. About coming into being. Effort. Legitimate...

The Main Gallery at South London Gallery is painted a cold blush pink and is occupied with a tall pile of wooden planks amalgamated into rickety towers in gradual collapse. They are leaning against each other—relational balance is important—and at their extremities are nested periodicals, fishing poles, clusters of dirt, porcelain hardware (toilets). The whole melancholy decor was sprayed, painted,...

This book of selected writings and interviews was published on the occasion of Glenn Ligon’s mid-career retrospective at the Whitney in 2011. I did not see the show but came upon the book at Camden Arts Center, in London, in 2012. Ten essays by the artist: on canonical artists, American history, Art history, contemporary culture. Ligon engages with archs that...