“The Ghost of Liberty” is Enrique Chagoya’s sixth codex in a series begun at Shark’s in 1998. Improvising on the traditional Mayan codex format, Chagoya has made a book with pages of varying sizes creating a format for large images and a varied rhythm across the codex. Chagoya’s selection of diverse images from many sources includes historic engravings, Chinese woodblock prints, comic books, pictographs and text in various languages. He re-interprets Philip Guston’s drawing, “Poor Richard”, replacing the figure with a portrait of George W. Bush.Chagoya creates pages where cultural, religious and political images are presented with humor in contradictory, unexpected and sometimes controversial contexts.
“The Ghost of Liberty” has been printed in thirteen colors from ten aluminum plates in an edition of thirty impressions, plus proofs, on handmade Amate paper by Master printer Bud Shark, assisted by Evan Colbert. The codex is presented as an accordion folded book which measures 11½ x 85” when fully opened.