Sam Gilliam: The Flow of Color
Pace Gallery, Seoul
January 10 – March 29, 2025
Pace Gallery, Tokyo
March 7 – April 19, 2025
Pace presents a two-part exhibition of work by Sam Gilliam at its Seoul and Tokyo galleries. This show brings together watercolors and Drape paintings created by the artist in the last several years of his life, between 2018 and 2022.
Widely recognized as one of the boldest innovators of postwar American painting, Sam 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, Sam 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.” Today, his work can be found in major museum collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; Tate in London; and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, among many others.
Notably, Sam 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, Sam 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.
“Japan was just marvelous,” Sam Gilliam said in a 2016 interview. “There was one person in our unit who did nothing but go to Kabuki theater. From what I had seen of the art world, I wasn’t sure if I still wanted to be an artist, but I knew I didn’t want to be a soldier. So, I grew up. I went back to school to do my thesis.”
Decades later, in 1991, the artist presented his first solo show in Seoul at the Walker Hill Arts Center and gave a lecture at the Daegu American Cultural Center as a participant in an arts exchange initiative organized by the United States Information Service (USIS). His work would return to the Korean capital for another major solo exhibition at Pace’s gallery in 2021.
Pace’s Gilliam exhibition across these two cities sheds light on the artist’s late-career experimentations with form, material, and process. The last years of his life were marked by intense creativity, adding new dimensions to the formal breakthroughs that had first brought him acclaim six decades earlier.
The Drape works included in Pace’s exhibition in Asia—all of which date to 2018—trace the artist’s late-career experimentations with texture, color, scale, and materiality through his use of Cerex nylon. Employing distinctive soaking, staining, pouring, folding, and spattering techniques, he created totalizing, entrancing compositions with seemingly illimitable contours of color and shape. These Drapes are suspended from the ceiling with a single cord, allowing the viewer to experience them in the round, as active features in a transformed environment, emphasizing the newfound luminosity Gilliam achieved as he continued to discover new energy in this career-defining form.
Like his Drapes, the artist began producing rich watercolor abstractions on Japanese washi paper in the 1960s. The techniques that he used in these works—staining, folding, and otherwise distressing the surface of the paper—exerted a powerful effect on his artistic practice as a whole. Through this medium, he came to understand color and form as physical, textural presences that reach beyond painting’s two-dimensional surface.
In his later watercolors, color and support became increasingly inseparable: the paper became the color rather than simply serving as its conveyer or carrier. 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, Sam Gilliam transformed his watercolor compositions into objects rather than images.
Concurrent with the run of its Sam Gilliam show in Seoul and Tokyo, Pace presents an exhibition of work by another key Washington Color School painter, Kenneth Noland, at both gallery locations.
Sam Gilliam (b. 1933, Tupelo, Mississippi; d. 2022, Washington D.C.) was one of the great innovators in postwar American painting. He emerged from the Washington, D.C. scene in the mid-1960s with works that elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of the Washington Color School. A series of formal breakthroughs would soon result 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, Sam Gilliam transformed his medium and the context in which it was viewed. As an artist in the nation’s capital at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, this was not merely an aesthetic proposition; it was a way of defining art’s role in a society undergoing dramatic change. Sam Gilliam pursued a pioneering course in which experimentation was the only constant. Inspired by the improvisatory ethos of jazz, his lyrical abstractions took on an increasing variety of forms, moods, and materials.
PACE SEOUL
267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul
PACE TOKYO
1F; Azabudai Hills Garden Plaza-A
5-8-1 Toranomon, Minato-ku, Tokyo
