Glenn Ligon

D'Amelio Terras, New York

Private Collection (acquired from the above)

Phillips New York, 26 September 2018, lot 8 (consigned by the above)

Acquired from the above by the present owner

New York, D'Amelio Gallery, Glenn Ligon: Colored, May 5 - June 9, 2001

“Art points to things. It's a way of giving people not the standard way of looking at the world.” — Glenn Ligon

In Sun (Version 1) #2, Glenn Ligon transforms a children’s coloring-book image into a charged meditation on race, memory, and the instability of representation. Ligon screenprints the source image onto canvas and intervenes with oil stick, crayon, and gesso, deliberately coloring outside the lines to preserve the rawness of the original gesture and evoke an uninhibited youthful exuberance. The resulting surface stages a collision between innocence and ideology, in which familiar icons are destabilized through distortion and reworking. Meaning emerges not from fidelity to the image, but from its misreading and reinterpretation, exposing how cultural symbols are continually constructed, fractured, and remade.

Ligon’s work has been exhibited internationally, with recent presentations including Late at Night, Early in the Morning, at Noon (January – April 2026) at Hauser & Wirth, New York, a two-part meditative exhibition centered on the color blue and its emotional and cultural resonance.