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Glenn Ligon: America
February 12–June 3, 2012
 Glenn Ligon: AMERICA is the first comprehensive, mid-career retrospective of Glenn Ligon (b. 1960), widely regarded as one of the most important and influential American artists to have emerged in the past two decades. Organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and curator Scott Rothkopf, in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition surveys 25 years of Ligon's work, from his student days until the present. The exhibition features roughly 100 works, including paintings, prints, photography, drawings, and sculptural installations, as well as the artist's recent, striking neon reliefs. The retrospective also debuts previously unexhibited early works, which shed light on Ligon's artistic origins, and for the first time reconstitutes major series within his work, such as the seminal Door paintings that launched his career.
Glenn Ligon: AMERICA is organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art. Major support for the exhibition is provided by the National Committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
This exhibition presents mature subject matter, including language, nudity, and sexual content.
RELATED PROGRAMS
Panel Discussion Disidentification: Race, Sexuality, and Contemporary Art
Reading and Discussion
A Day of Films in Conjunction with Glenn Ligon: AMERICA
FOCUS: Katie Paterson
March 4–April 15, 2012
Katie Paterson is known for her multidisciplinary and conceptually driven work, with an emphasis on nature, ecology, geology, and cosmology. Many of her installations have been the result of intensive research and collaboration with specialists as diverse as astronomers, nanotechnologists, and firework manufacturers. Recent works in this exhibition include: All the Dead Stars (2009), a large map documenting the locations of 27,000 dead stars known to humanity; and Light bulb to Simulate Moonlight (2009), an incandescent bulb designed to transmit wavelength properties identical to those of moonlight.
Paterson received her BA in 2004 from Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland and her MFA in 2007 from the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She has since participated in exhibitions at Modern Art Oxford, England; the Power Plant, Toronto, Canada; and Haunch of Venison, London, England. Her work has also been featured in the Whitstable Biennial 2010, Whitstable, England; PERFORMA 09, New York, New York; and Altermodern: Tate Triennial 2009, Tate Britain, London, England. She currently holds a John Florent Stone fellowship at Edinburgh College of Art, and is the Leverhulme Artist-in-Residence in the Astrophysics Group at the University College London for the 2010–2011 academic year. The artist lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
FOCUS: Ged Quinn
April 22–June 17, 2012
Ged Quinn’s paintings combine landscapes in the vein of Claude Lorrain with fragments of history, art history, and mythology. The works are awe-inspiring in their combination of painterly skills and provocative conceptual strains. In Quinn’s work, sublime backgrounds meet broken-down foregrounds, and at all turns utopian ideals are acknowledged and critiqued. Death, deceit, and decay are also dragged into the frame.
Ged Quinn (b. 1963 in Liverpool, England) lives and works in Cornwall, England. His work has been included in numerous solo exhibitions, including Somebody’s Coming That Hates Us, Wilkinson Gallery, London, England (2010); The Heavenly Machine, Spike Island, Bristol, England (2005); and Utopia Dystopia, Tate St. Ives, Cornwall, England (2004). Notable past group exhibitions include The Witching Hour, Water Hall, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Leverkusen, Germany (2010); Lust for Life and Dance of Death, Kunsthalle Krems, Austria (2010); Newspeak: British Art Now, Saatchi Gallery, London, England (2010), and State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersberg, Russia (2009–10); Made Up, Liverpool Biennale, Tate Liverpool, England (2008); Collezionami 2, Biennale of Southern Italy, Bari, Puglia (2006); and The Real Ideal, Millenium Galleries, Sheffield, England (2005).
LUCIAN FREUD: PORTRAITS
July 1–October 28, 2012
Lucian Freud is widely considered the greatest portrait painter of the twentieth century. His visceral renderings of people from all walks of life have a painterly and psychological drama that is unparalleled in contemporary art. For much of a century—from the late 1940s until his recent death in July 2011—Freud made the living human presence his subject. The Modern’s chief curator, Michael Auping, remarks,“ While numerous generations of artists working in the genre of portraiture have come to rely on the photographic image, Freud always insisted on being in the room with his subjects as he painted. His portraits are not only the result of the artist’s intense observations, but often subtle interactions between painter and subject. His paintings represent these relationships, as well as the unique people they portray.”
Freud’s subjects range from neighbors, friends, lovers, family, art world personalities, and royalty. His paintings are, in essence, a visual biography. The exhibition will be divided into broad thematic groups that concentrate on particular periods; groups of sitters; and formal considerations, demonstrating the development of the artist’s painting techniques.
Organized by the National Portrait Gallery, London, in association with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the exhibition will consist of approximately 90 works, dating between 1943 and 2011. Fort Worth will be the only U.S. venue. A major book will document the exhibition, and will include essays by Auping, Picasso scholar John Richardson, exhibition curator Sarah Howgate, and a series of interviews between Freud and Auping.
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