Online Viewing Room

Sam Gilliam

Watercolors

Mar 16 – Mar 28, 2020

Untitled by Sam Gilliam — Sam Gilliam, *Untitled*, 2019, watercolor on washi, 74" × 39" (188 cm × 99.1 cm) paper

Since completing his art education in the early 1960s, Sam Gilliam has been creating richly colored abstract compositions using watercolors on Japanese washi paper.

The application of watercolor is inherently more unruly than that of other types of paint—it bleeds into the fibers of the paper, resistant to the careful control that is possible with oil or acrylic on canvas. In graduate school, one of Gilliam’s professors had pushed him to produce watercolors on paper as a way of mitigating a sense of control. Several years later, for an exhibition at the Adams-Morgan Gallery in Washington, D.C., in 1963 Gilliam had chosen to include one solitary watercolor in the show, marking the moment that he began to seriously consider the possibility that the medium could occupy a central place in his artistic practice.

Gilliam has since pushed the chromatic and textural possibilities of watercolors with unprecedented verve. His works saturate the paper support with luminous pigment and transform the composition into an object, rather than an image.

I’d always been afraid of art. I was afraid in college. But that fear is a goal, in a way: It makes you hesitate, and then you delay your start, and then you have a breakthrough.

Sam Gilliam

The techniques that Gilliam has explored in watercolor—staining, folding, and otherwise distressing the surface of the paper—have exerted a powerful effect on his artistic practice as a whole. His early approach to watercolor expanded upon the staining technique that was adopted on canvas by several other Washington School colorists in the late 1950s and early ’60s, including Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland. As Gilliam’s practice matured, his watercolors began to play a powerful role in shaping his own approach to the canvas, opening up a new sense of freedom and an embrace of abstraction.

Gilliam’s most recent watercolors extend this ongoing practice, making color into a palpable thing, a physical, textural presence that seems to belong more to our world than to the two-dimensional surface of the painting. Color and support are inseparable: the paper becomes the color, rather than a conveyer or carrier for it. Like his draped canvases, a sense of depth in the creases and folds of the fabric is echoed in the composition of each watercolor painting. Vertical washes of color on each flattened surface create the illusion of folds or pleats within rich and rhythmic planes of light and dark that bleed and overlap. Like much of Gilliam’s work, both chance and choice play an important role, echoing the artist’s love of jazz, with its improvisatory ethos and spontaneity.

Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, photography by Fredrik Nilsen Studio.

b. 1933, Tupelo, Mississippi

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. Suspending stretcherless lengths of painted canvas from the walls or ceilings of exhibition spaces, Gilliam transformed his medium and the contexts in which it was viewed. For an African-American artist in the nation’s capital at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, this was not merely an aesthetic proposition; it was a way of defining art’s role in a society undergoing dramatic change. Gilliam has subsequently pursued a pioneering course in which experimentation has been the only constant. Inspired by the improvisatory ethos of jazz, his lyrical abstractions continue to take on an increasing variety of forms, moods, and materials.

To inquire about any of the works featured in this exhibition, please email inquiries@pacegallery.com.

Past, Sam Gilliam, Watercolors, Mar 16, 2020