ART CITIES:Los Angeles-Sam Gilliam

Sam Gilliam is one of the great innovators in postwar American painting. He emerged from the Washington, D.C. scene in the mid-1960s with works that elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of Color School painting. A series of formal breakthroughs would soon result in his canonical Drape paintings, which expanded upon the tenets of Abstract Expressionism in entirely new ways.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Kordansky Gallery Archive

The exhibition “Moving West Again” features new paintings by Sam Gilliam that continue the artist’s six-decade exploration of color and materiality. The exhibition includes various scales of Gilliam’s signature Beveled-edge stretcher paintings, a typology of work dating back to 1967 and which demonstrates several striking formal advances. The new works are suffused with densely layered materials including tin and copper raw metals, sawdust and aluminum shavings, and pieces of socks sourced from Gilliam’s studio. He flings, splatters, and throws this media onto the canvas, creating cosmic fields of color marked over by the artist’s hand or scraped into by a garden rake. Relentlessly experimenting with the conventions of painting, these new works are thick with rich white, yellow, and blue impasto, demonstrating Gilliam’s ability to compose lyrical depth from the stretched canvas on a beveled frame. This effect, which Gilliam has perfected over decades, makes it seem as if the painting itself is emerging from the wall on which it is hung.

In 1951, Sam Gilliam graduated from Central High School and attended the University of Louisville. In 1955, he received his B.A. degree in fine art, and also held his first solo art exhibition. Gilliam entered the U.S. Army in 1956 and served for two years. Following his discharge, he returned to the University of Louisville. After three years of graduate school, Gilliam received his M.A. degree in painting in 1961. In 1963, artist Thomas Downing introduced Gilliam to the Washington Color School, which was defined by bold colors. Two years later, Gilliam contributed his own innovation to the school by displaying unframed painted canvases, which allowed the work to flow naturally with the architecture of the display space. In 1971, Gilliam boycotted a show at the Whitney Art Museum in New York City in solidarity with the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, in criticism that the museum did not consult black art experts in the selection of artists. In 1973, Gilliam created for the San Francisco Museum of Art the free-standing work “Autumn Surf” which consisted of acrylic sheeting hung over wooden support beams to give the impression of waves. By 1975, he had moved away from draped canvases to geometric collages, most notably the “Black Paintings” and the “White Collage Paintings”. Also, in 1975, Gilliam created “Seahorses”  his first outdoor work, for the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 1983, Gilliam was featured in his first major retrospective at the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washington, D.C. In the new millennium, Gilliam has continued to work with birch plywood and metal forms as structural elements. Though his work is featured in galleries throughout the world and he is a self-sustaining artist, Gilliam is committed to teaching youth the foundations of art and has worked in numerous facilities including Washington, D.C., Public Schools, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland.

Photo: Sam Gilliam, Morning Rush, 2021, Acrylic, tin, and aluminum granules on canvas, 48 x 72 x 2 3/4 inches / 121.9 x 182.9 x 7 cm, © Sam Gilliam, courtesy the Artist and David  Kordansky Gallery

Info: David  Kordansky Gallery, 5130 W. Edgewood Pl., Los Angeles, Duration: 15/5-2/7/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidkordanskygallery.com