Sam Gilliam

Sam Gilliam (1933–2022) is one of the great innovators in postwar American painting. Each stage of his six-decade career was characterized by a quest for reinvention, formal and material experimentation, and a desire to renew his audience’s—and his own—understanding of what painting could become. White and Black Paintings, 1975–1977 brings together important works from a period when Gilliam experimented with color, texture, scale, and materiality in wholly new ways.

Beginning with the White paintings, Gilliam built up sculptural, all-over surfaces dominated by layers of white paint made viscerally frenetic through the incorporation of hardening mediums that give them a palpable presence. Other colors that emerge from behind and around these encrusted white veils engage in a limitless play of dark and light, introducing complex, shifting moods in these decidedly non-monochromatic images. He also continued his use of beveled-edge stretchers; previous beveled-edge works foregrounded juxtapositions of prismatic color and dynamic sculptural form. In the White and Black paintings, the stretchers further emphasize the architectural solidity of Gilliam’s approach to pigment and medium, and firmly root the works in the spaces where they are installed.

The White and Black paintings are characterized by marks made with everyday tools; among them are shag rug rakes that Gilliam first employed during this period and continued to use in subsequent bodies of work throughout the next five decades. The rake allowed him to introduce both energetic linearity and textural relief and, as seen especially in the Black paintings, to highlight the geological feel of the paints he was mixing. Through these works, Gilliam continued to envision how painting could be a fully encompassing experience, transforming the relationship between the hand and the gestural mark into one between the painter’s entire body and the complete range of their materials.