“But Realism in Art can only be achieved in one way–through artifice” – André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2 “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.” – Jasper Johns In Prompts, Glenn Ligon’s sixth exhibition with Thomas Dane Gallery, the artist has assembled a group of earlier and new works which conspicuously inform, contextualise, re-contextualise, appropriate and, somehow, ‘prompt’ one another.
One of the most enduring and original aspects of Ligon’s practice is the way he has–through subtle alterations and re-framing–created bodies of work in a continuous, self-referencing process over years, sometimes decades. Nowhere is this more evident than in the numerous variations of his emblematic ‘AMERICA’ neons, which for over twenty years have served as both an insight into the artist’s meticulous approach, and as an ingenious and elliptic parable for the country itself.