Sam Gilliam, Late Paintings (Installation View), via Art Observed
Debuting a suite of large-scale paintings and works on paper executed in the last two years of his life, Pace Gallery has opened Late Paintings, a testament to artist Sam Gilliam’s commitment to abstraction. Conceived together with the artist prior to his death in June of 2022, the exhibition occupies the entirety of Pace’s Hanover Square gallery, and marks the first-ever solo exhibition for the artist’s work in the United Kingdom.Â
Sam Gilliam, Late Paintings (Installation View), via Art Observed
Throughout his nearly seven-decade career, Gilliam invented and continuously reinvented a singular and deeply influential approach to abstraction, working both with paint and with the canvas itself in radically new and revolutionary ways. A leading member of the Washington Color School in the 1960s, Gilliam’s paintings, sculptures, and installations continued to draw on myriad influences including music, poetry, and politics throughout his career. These monumental late paintings underscore the artist’s long engagement with the bevelled-edge canvas, here turned towards material landscapes, constructed from densely layered and richly saturated pigment, applied through a vast range of expressive gestures and experimental techniques of mark-making. Rich spatter and flickers of color negotiate with subtle line-work and multiple layers of paint, creating networks of color that provide a near endless series of entry points for the work, mass networks of material that underscore experimentations with acrylic and a range of other materials to arrive at meticulously rendered tonalities.
Sam Gilliam, Late Paintings (Installation View), via Art Observed
In addition to large-scale acrylic on canvas paintings, the exhibition also includes a suite of Gilliam’s watercolors on washi paper that relate to his ongoing Slice series, which he also began in the late 1960s. Throughout his career Gilliam developed a practice of creating works in watercolor on paper, which explore the medium’s distinct material properties. Over the last several decades of his life, Gilliam worked with a specialist paper supplier in Japan to achieve a precise quality of washi that was delicate enough to hold pigment in its purest state and durable enough for him to fold and paint in a manner reminiscent of his Slice paintings on canvas.
Sam Gilliam, Late Paintings (Installation View), via Art Observed
Taken as a whole, the show is a rich and fascinating engagement with Gilliam’s work as a student of paint itself, and the raw possibilities it carries in the hands of a true master.
The show closes November 12th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Sam Gilliam: Late Paintings [Exhibition Site]
