Dense with rich pigment, Figure # 60 from 2010 is a conceptually refined and aesthetically dazzling paragon of Ligon’s celebrated body of text paintings. Delineated in thickly applied silkscreen and coal dust, the present work channels the intertextual foundations of preceding works in Ligon’s oeuvre but stands apart from earlier examples in its near complete obfuscation of the artist’s source text. Utilizing the sweeping gesture inherent to non-objective painting to address the notions of race, gender and sexuality that center Ligon’s body of work, Figure # 60 represents a new height in Ligon’s career spanning sociopolitical inquiry in art.

In the present work, Ligon’s text is variably pulled, distorted and erased. Throughout Ligon’s oeuvre, text acts as both formal approach and as content; in Figure # 60, the artist is not only visually disrupting the composition, but also his approach to meaning. Broadly, the artist’s text works take important quotations from iconic black figures as varied as James Baldwin, Richard Pryor and Zora Neale Hurston and imprints them in silk screen and coal dust onto the canvas, creating haunting, rhythmic imagery. Describing this important series, Curator Scott Rothkopf intones, “Ligon understands that quotation is itself an interpretative act. The choice of what to say reveals something about the person who says it. He selected texts to express his curiosity about his place in the world, and over time, that curiosity clearly extended to the words themselves and to the very act of painting them.” (Scott Rothkopf in Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Glenn Ligon: AMERICA, 2011, p. 29). A new development in this revered lineage, the composition of Figure # 60 is resplendent, with loose, blurred characters that allude to narrative while evading legibility.

Taking Ligon’s treatment of his text to the extreme, the present work boldly confronts broad notions of meaning, its creation and eventual distortion. Across the canvas, Ligon’s text is rent from the surface, leaving a white void in its wake. Intermittently, coal dust is applied with such great thickness that sentences fall into incoherence, with individual vowels, consonants and other fragments emerging into legibility. The conceptualism that undermines much of Glenn Ligon's artistic output is subverted in the present work, which in its resistance to easy reading, mirrors the ways in which differences in race, sexuality and gender operate in the view of a mainstream majority. Resonant and beguiling, Figure # 60 is a challenge to its viewer, a dual invitation and rejection that mirrors the challenges inherent in the quest to be understood.