Sam Gilliam: The Last Five Years
By Laura Heyrman
Currently on display at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, “Sam Gilliam: The Last Five Years” is an exhibition of late works by the American artist Sam Gilliam (1933 – 2022), an important force in non-objective art for close to sixty years. As a Black artist, Gilliam resisted calls to return to representational art in support of the Civil Rights Movement, remaining a believer in the power of non-representational art, and especially of color, to communicate a multitude of meanings.
In the early 1960s, after serving in the Army, completing two degrees at the University of Louisville, and marrying, Gilliam moved to Washington, DC, to enable his wife to take a job as the first Black reporter at the Washington Post. In 1963, he presented his first solo exhibition of figurative and abstract works. When a fellow artist told Gilliam that the best work in the show was the only completely abstract work, he became confident that non-representational art was his future course. Associated with the Washington Color School, Gilliam experimented with various modes of non-representational art, looking closely at Abstract Expressionism and other trends of previous decades, until he discovered his own technique of manipulating unstretched canvas as color soaked into it. Once he had perfected this technique, the artist constantly reinvented his basic approach by applying it in new ways. Early works included stretching the stained canvas on traditionally flat stretchers or wrapping the canvases over beveled supports. A long series of works in which swaths of stained canvas are draped from walls and ceilings persisted from their introduction in 1968 until the draped nylon works in the current exhibition. In another series, the artist collaged pieces of stained canvas in geometric arrangements, in some cases adding thickened white or black material which created sculptural textures on the surfaces of his paintings.
In this Viewing Room, I’ve included a selection of the three bodies of work included in “Sam Gilliam: The Last Five Years,” Drapes, Tondos, and Works on Paper. Works in the Drapes series incorporate space and movement, typically elements of sculpture and architecture, into Gilliam’s paintings. Unlike many of the earlier Drapes, the late examples here are made of Cerex nylon. This lighter weight fabric remains slightly translucent even after staining and seems to float as it hangs from the ceiling or wall. “A” and the Carpenter II is a reimagining of a 1973 work in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. These works poke fun at a common criticism of works by Gilliam, Helen Frankenthaler, and Jackson Pollock, that their works look like drop cloths from the studio floor. In both versions, a Drape seems to have collapsed onto a wooden sawhorse. While the earlier version used heavy cotton canvas, the polypropylene fabric in this later version suggests a flowing stream of colors.
The Tondos are an innovation reached in the last year of the artist’s life and stand apart from his other works in that they don’t include any stained canvas. A tondo is a circular painting, a form dating back at least to the Renaissance. In these works acrylic paint was applied to a wooden support which was then framed in aluminum. The frames divide the circle into four quadrants but the textures and colors are continuous from quadrant to quadrant. The hard-edged shapes look back to Gilliam’s earliest non-representational works while the textured surfaces, many of which contain bits of copper and sawdust sweepings from the studio floor, are reminiscent of the artist's late 1970s White Paintings and Black Paintings.
The works on paper in this exhibition also look back, in this case to the watercolors that Gilliam first worked with as an undergraduate student. In the late works, he applied the paint as he had used acrylic on canvas. Using different kinds of paper means that the colors were absorbed in different ways. One key difference between the paper works and Gilliam’s fabric stainings is that the papers accommodated sharp folds not practical in the fabrics. These create clearly defined linear elements which contrast with the flowing colors.
The variety of works Sam Gilliam created over his long career is exhilarating. After you enjoy this selection of works from “Sam Gilliam: The Last Five Years,” I hope you’ll be inspired to seek out more of the artist’s creations, whether in nearby museums and galleries or online.
See more works from this exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery, 5130 W. Edgewood Pl., Los Angeles, CA 90019 through March 3, and on the gallery website. link: https://www.davidkordanskygallery.com/exhibitions/sam-gilliam7
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