Untitled by Sam Gilliam
Online

Off the Wall

Sam Gilliam, Untitled, 2018

Mar 31 – Apr 30, 2022

This focused online exhibition spotlights Sam Gilliam’s 2018 drape painting Untitled, in which parallel compositions fall in waves and gather in elegant layers. Rendered in warm purple, pink, yellow, and orange tones, the idiosyncratic abstractions in the work are born of the artist’s soaking, folding, and spattering techniques.
Sam Gilliam, Untitled, 2018, acrylic on Cerex nylon, installation dimensions variable approximate installation dimensions (146" x 124" x 110")

The year 1968 was one of revelation and determination. Something was in the air, and it was in that spirit that I did the drape paintings.

Sam Gilliam
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Sam Gilliam has been developing his distinct approach to abstraction since the 1960s when he expanded upon Washington Color School painting and Abstract Expressionism with his inventive style. A great innovator in postwar American painting, the artist reinvigorated the medium with his sculptural drape canvases, which he began creating in 1968 amid the American Civil Rights Movement.
Untitled by Sam Gilliam
Gilliam’s iconic drape paintings reflect the artist’s indefatigable experimentations in color, material, form, and space. With these works, the artist reimagines and redefines the possibilities of painting. Comprising unstretched canvases displayed from ceilings, walls, or other objects, including sawhorses, the expansive drape paintings feature mesmeric abstractions in vibrant colors.
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Untitled figures in the exhibition Epistrophy at Pace’s New York gallery. The presentation brings together works by Gilliam, Melvin Edwards, and William T. Williams, all of whom are key figures in the history of abstraction. Reflecting these artists’ decades-long friendship and exploring their relationships to jazz, Epistrophy centers on conversations among individual bodies of work by Gilliam, Edwards, and Williams.
On a formal level, Untitled can be understood in dialogue with paintings by Williams and works on paper by Edwards in the exhibition. Williams’s bold use of color in his hard-edge geometric painting of the early 1970s and Edwards’s lyrical watercolor and mixed media compositions on paper engage in lively exchanges with one another and Gilliam’s drape painting.
Untitled by Sam Gilliam
The ways that Gilliam’s drape paintings relate to their surrounding environments contribute to their magic. Often situated suspended in space, these striking works produce a totalizing, entrancing effect, immersing viewers in their seemingly illimitable contours.
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As curator Adrienne Edwards writes, “We behold Gilliam’s draped works not solely through our optical absorption of them but also through being enveloped by and entangled in them. At the moment of encounter, the drape atmosphere binds us up and embraces us, while also intervening in its surroundings, whether by sloping against the side of a building, looming overhead in a museum gallery, or siphoning corner of a church or home.”
Sam Gilliam, Untitled, 2018, acrylic on Cerex nylon, installation dimensions variable approximate installation dimensions (146" x 124" x 110")
To inquire about this work and more works by Sam Gilliam, please email us at inquiries@pacegallery.com.

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  • Past, Off the Wall, Sam Gilliam, Untitled, 2018, Mar 31, 2022