Author Description

Ligon belongs to a generation of artists who came to prominence in the late 1980s on the strength of conceptually based paintings and phototext works, investigating the social, linguistic and political constructions of races, gender and sexuality. Informed by his experience as an African American and as a gay man living in the United States, his art is a sustained meditation on issues of quotation, the presence of the past in the present, and the representation of self in relation to culture and history. This catalogue, published on occasion of an exhibition with the same title, presents a series of 50 unique silk-screens featuring a self-portrait of the artist. Ligon's head is repeatedly presented, one to a page against a backdrop of different colours, from the front or the back, both showing and hiding the identity of the artist.