Sam Gilliam is the most well-known and pioneering abstract painter of his lusciously dyed drape paintings, which fully incorporates his medium in three dimensions more than any other artist of his generation. , Became the first black artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1972, died Saturday at his home in Washington. He was 88 years old.
Death was announced by David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles and Pace Gallery in New York. The cause was renal failure.
Mr. Gilliam had two anomalies. As a black artist, he was largely ignored by the upper levels of the art world until the second half of his career. And as a black artist working on abstraction, he devoted his life to paintings with recognizable images and clear political messages that many of his colleagues prefer. However, his art was in many ways opposed to both painting and political art.
Gilliam was in a period of social and political turmoil during the Vietnam War and the black civil rights struggle during the 1960s and 1970s, when abstract painting experiments were flourishing. But even in this context, he was particularly bold.
A brilliant colorist, he became known for freeing paintings from the flat straightness imposed by wooden stretchers. Instead, he draped unstretched abstract canvas from the ceiling with large curves and loops, or collected them and fixed them to the wall.
In “A and the Carpenter, I” (1973), a large canvas drawn with airy pink and blue clouds was piled up between two wooden sawhorses to create a work that looks elegant even if it is unfinished. Introduced the element of labor. , And it looked different each time it was installed, like many of Gilliam’s works.
His efforts went back and forth between painting and sculpture, and his technique evoked everything from Jackson Pollock’s drips to tie-dyeing. They pushed the medium far beyond the wall-mounted canvas created at the time by Frank Stella and his followers. They were at the same time aggressive and lyrical, influencing the viewer’s space and providing a gorgeous, flowing color moment while rejecting a single safe center of view. And they challenged the viewer every time, “Is this a painting?”
This in itself created a kind of visual confusion suitable for times of instability. The paintings in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York are simply entitled “10/27/69” and are set against the backdrop of a major protest against the Vietnam War.
“The expressive act of marking and hanging it in space is always political,” he said in a 2018 interview with The Art Newspaper Joseda Silva. “My work is as political as the formal one.”
A complete obituary will be published shortly.
