Lot Note:

Sam Gilliam challenged the foundations of every medium he put his hand to, and the print studio offered a playground of materials and techniques. He is perhaps best remembered for his experiments with color field painting in the 1970s. His canvases were draped and suspended – like the sheets hanging from the clothesline he could see outside his Washington studio – breaking away from the rigid forms of the stretcher that had dominated painting since the introduction of stretched canvas paintings in the sixteenth century.  

He began his career in the 1960s and ‘70s as part of the Washington Color School, coming to art during the tumultuous years of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement. As a Black artist, Gilliam was largely ignored by the mainstream art world until late in his career. Nonetheless, he continued to interrogate materiality and its associations in African American culture. Though many of his Black contemporaries used easily identifiable imagery to speak to the Black experience, Gilliam was devoted to abstraction. His experiments included layered materials, collage, and overlaid forms in the composition that reference, for example, quiltmaking traditions. These experiments moved his artworks away from their traditional place on a rectilinear sheet of paper, allowing each to be an encrusted and freestanding form with rich impasto and spontaneity.  

Gilliam brought to printmaking the same impulse to break constraints that he brought to his painting. He began working with printmaking in the early 1970s, mediating the space between sculpture, painting, and print. Untitled, 1975(Lot 24) contains vertical, flowing lines of color that seep into the hand made paper pulp, mirroring his practice of staining unprimed canvases. By the 1980s, he moved away from these formal explorations of color and began incorporating new and highly innovative techniques. Purple Antelope Space Squeeze, 1987 (Lot 23) was his debut work at Tandem Press. The work layers multiple techniques that would be virtually impossible to reconstruct. On hand made molded paper, Gilliam began with relief printing, adding hand-painted collage, inked and uninked metal plates, and found objects, and then hand-painted details while the inks were still wet. This resulted in unique works with individual coloring released in editions that he called “varied editions”. These editions challenged the previously held tenet that printmakers needed to produce an exacting, identical run.