SAM GILLIAM: THE FLOW OF COLOR
Pace is pleased to present The Flow of Color, a two-part exhibition of work by Sam Gilliam at its Seoul and Tokyo galleries.
January 10 - March 29, 2025
Widely recognized as one of the boldest innovators of postwar American painting, Gilliam emerged from the Washington, D.C. scene in the mid 1960s with works that elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of Color School painting. Drawing inspiration from the use of color, line, and movement in Renaissance painting—in addition to the long history of formalism in modernist art—the artist nurtured a radical vision for his work that transcended the traditional boundaries of painting and sculpture, gesturing toward a new mode of making that would come to be understood as installation. Through his tireless experimentations with technique, gesture, materiality, color, and space, he continually reinvented his practice, pursuing a lifelong inquiry into the expressive, aesthetic, and philosophical powers of abstraction.
A series of formal breakthroughs early in his career resulted 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. “The year 1968 was one of revelation and determination,” the artist once said. “Something was in the air, and it was in that spirit that I did the Drape paintings.”
Notably, Gilliam cultivated ties to both Seoul and Tokyo during his lifetime. From 1956 to 1958, when he served as a company clerk in the US army, he was stationed at a base in Yokohama, Japan, visiting nearby art galleries, stores, and woodcut studios whenever he had the time. Also traveling to Tokyo during this period, Gilliam had his first encounter with the work of Yves Klein, a formative experience that, combined with his exposure to Japanese art and architecture, marked “a beginning of when I finally became an artist,” as he once put it.
The sense of depth in the creases and folds of his Drapes is also echoed in his watercolors. Vertical washes of color on these flattened surfaces create the illusion of folds or pleats, and planes of light and dark colors bleed into one another. Saturating the paper support with luminous pigment, Gilliam transformed his watercolor compositions into objects rather than images.