SAM
GILLIAM (1933 - )
Sam Gilliam was born in Tupelo, Mississippi
in 1933 and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, where he received
an MA in painting at the University of Louisville in 1961 and
also an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters at the University
of Louisville in 1980.
It has been nearly five years since Sam
Gilliam had a one- person exhibition in New York, over seventeen
since his work was seen in the city in any depth. He had a show
at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1982. The interval has been
a productive one for Gilliam, which won't surprise anyone who
has followed his prodigious achievements. But it has also been
a time of transformation for the artist, a time when a direction
that has been implicit in his work for some time has found explicit
expression. Gilham's paintings have always strained against their
boundaries, their edges and their surfaces. Lately, they have
exploded forcefully and effectively into three dimensions.
Gilliam's present work has its origins
in paintings he made in the early 1980's. He was then literally
raking huge quantities of acrylic paint and gel across a large
canvas, then cutting the canvas into fairly regular geometric
shapes; triangles and rectangles, wedges and arcs and stitching
the parts together in an improvisatory way, almost like a crazy
quilt. While the resulting compositions were in fact quite flat,
their colliding geometries and their vibrant colors made the
surfaces seem to pulsate and jump.
Then Gilliam started to pun on this effect.
He began attaching enameled aluminum elements to the edges of
his paintings - actual three-dimensional forms that were small
at first in simple geometric shapes, then larger and more complicated.
For the most part, the surfaces of these projecting elements
were smooth, making them - paradoxically - seem flatter than
the painted surfaces to which they were attached.
In 1990 Gilliam had occasion to execute
a number of actual sculptures; some of them against a wall, as
in the Davis Square Subway Station in Boston, some of them suspended
in space, as in the Library of the University of Louisville.
Using the same geometric shapes as in the paintings and combining
them in the same way, Gilliam brought these sculptures to the
brink of chaos by building them out dramatically into space,
using color sometimes poured onto the surface to intensify the
three-dimensional effect.
Gilliam's 1990s works and they are some
of his best to date, marry the sculpture to the painting in the
former and extending the latter. They combine shaped canvases
no longer quilted but still patterned with raked masses of acrylic
and gel, with cut out aluminum elements, circles, broken circles,
and perforated cones that seem to float in front of them. But
these projected elements are now heavily painted and textured,
bearing the same raked surfaces and the same lush colors as the
canvas behind them. The sculptural elements are thereby brought
under some measure of control, and made to cohere with the painted
surface. They are also dispersed across the painting rather than
clustered at the edge or in the center as in many of Gilliam's
previous works. This reinforces the coherence Gilliam achieves
through chromatic and textural consistency.
Thus much has changed in Gilliam's work;
but much has stayed the same. Within a somewhat more controlled
idiom, his paintings still achieve that tense equilibrium between
the regularizing influence of geometry and the explosive power
of color and texture. There is something in Gilliam that loves
a struggle and, here, as often in the best of his work, it lies
in the effort to reconcile a cool intellectual structure with
a richly expressive manipulation of paint. He is carrying the
effort off brilliantly.
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