The artist, born in 1933 in the state of Mississippi was the first African American to represent the United States at the Venice Biennial, in 1972.
Le Monde
The African-American abstract painter Sam Gilliam, known for his colored canvases and left free of the chassis on which they are generally attached, died on Saturday June 25 at the age of 88, announced on Monday two galleries having collaborated with him. He died, in his home in Washington, of renal failure according to the New York Times.
“Sam Gilliam was one of the giants of modernism,” said Arne Glimcher, the founder of the Galerie Pace, quoted in the press release. “Sam embodied a vital spirit of freedom, obtained with courage, ferocity, sensitivity and poetry,” added David Kordansky, of the gallery of the same name.
It was in the late 1960s that Sam Gilliam, who had already painted his colorful forms on folded canvases before tearing them on their chassis, produced some of his works The most emblematic, the “drapes”, completely getting rid of their canvases of their wooden supports to drop them freely from the ceiling or walls.
“These revolutionary works (…) have changed the history of art”, write the gallery owners. “Gilliam has transformed the support of painting and its relationship to the spatial and architectural context in which it is seen.”
“1968 was a year of revelation and determination,” said the artist, quoted by the press release. Three of these canvases are currently exhibited at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, as part of the exhibition “La Couleur en Fugue”, until August 29, 2022.