Sam Gilliam @ Pace Galleries Seoul & Tokyo - "The Flow of Color" Exhibition

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

www.pacegallery.com

Kenneth Noland @ Pace Galleries Seoul & Tokyo - "Paintings 1966 - 2006" Exhibition

Kenneth Noland

Paintings 1966 - 2006

Pace Gallery, Seoul

January 10 – March 29, 2025

Pace Gallery, Tokyo

March 7 – April 19, 2025

Pace presents a two-part survey of work by American painter Kenneth Noland at its Seoul and Tokyo galleries. These two distinct presentations of rare, museum-quality paintings bring together works created between the 1960s and early 2000s, encompassing the artist’s most celebrated series. This is the first exhibition dedicated to Noland’s work in both countries in some 30 years.

A founding member of the Washington Color School—which included Sam Gilliam, Morris Louis, and Alma Thomas among others—Kenneth Noland was instrumental in forging the language of postwar abstraction in the US. His experimental approach to form and color gave rise to radical works that redefined the medium of painting. Between 1946 and 1948, Kenneth Noland studied at Black Mountain College in his native North Carolina. There, he was exposed to the ideas of seminal figures such as Josef Albers and John Cage, developing an early interest in the expressive potential of color and chance. As his style matured, the artist would continue to treat color as a resonant force in his abstractions, which feature circles, chevrons, and other geometric forms.

“By 1960, Ken Noland had become an artist of the first rank, often great, and a primary force in the development of abstract art,” the late curator William Agee, who knew Noland personally, wrote in a 2014 essay accompanying Pace’s first exhibition of the artist’s work in New York. “His was from start to finish an art of color, part of a long tradition that dates in the modern era to Impressionism, runs through Cézanne and Matisse, into the 20th century…”

Eminent critics and artists also lauded Noland’s work, with Donald Judd affirming in 1965, “By now Kenneth Noland’s salience isn’t debatable; he’s one of the best painters.”

Pace survey of Kenneth Noland’s work in Asia presents a full picture of his practice, featuring marquee paintings from his Stripe, Shape, Plaid, Chevron, Diamond, Flares, Doors, Mysteries, and Into the Cool series. The earliest paintings in the exhibition include Stripe and Diamond works he produced in the mid and late 1960s, when a new visual language emerged from his early Circles from the 1950s. These horizontally-oriented Stripe and Diamond paintings stretch across several meters beyond the viewer’s peripheral vision, evoking the feel of a vast, enveloping landscape. Kenneth Noland would use an array of techniques to apply bands of color in specific proportions—including staining the raw canvas or using a traditional paint roller—to create textural variation. With his use of acrylic paint, which cannot be reworked as easily as oil, Noland embraced the risk factor, quipping that he was a “one-shot painter.” Regardless of the technique he employed in his painting practice, Noland intentionally removed traces of his hand to focus attention on the materiality of the works while also allowing for chance reactions where bands of paint meet.

At the start of the 1970s, Noland began painting vertical stripes over his horizontal bands. The resulting works, his Plaid paintings, draw parallels with the paintings of Piet Mondrian, an early influence on Noland via his Black Mountain College teacher Ilya Bolotowsky, a proponent of the De Stijl philosophy. But unlike Mondrian, Noland retained the soft blur ofstained canvas in his lines, cultivating a quasi-alchemical effect as colors overlap and knit together.

In the ensuing years—when Kenneth Noland was the center of a community of artists in Bennington, Vermont that also included Jules Olitski and Anthony Caro—he turned his attention to the canvas support itself. By creating shaped paintings that took unusual, asymmetrical forms, Kenneth Noland emphasized the objecthood of the painting. These works, with their large expanses of a single color, have a textural richness resulting from the paint’s interaction with the raw canvas and the artist’s distinct and often uneven application.

Chevron paintings from the mid-1980s in Pace’s exhibition refer to a pattern and shape that Kenneth Noland first began exploring in the 1960s but attest to a new concern with texture. In these later Chevron paintings, vertical v-shapes contain a range of colors applied in various depths, thick and thin, creating nuanced textural qualities on their surfaces.

Kenneth Noland’s melding of color and shape is also evident in his Flares series, the first body of work he conceived and executed in California, from the early 1990s. These paintings are especially innovative for their incorporation of colorful and translucent plexiglass strips. Wedged between the irregularly shaped panels of each work, these glossy bands activate a complex interplay between color, material, and form. To Noland, the Flares were “constructed pictures” with “separate component parts,” relating them to both collage and sculpture. He further enhanced the objecthood of the Flares by painting their sides in colors that do not match their frontal surfaces.

Small-scale Doors paintings from the late 1980s and early 1990s in Pace’s show offer a more intimate experience of Noland’s abstractions, while Mysteries works from the early 2000s—composed of concentric or horizontal bands of varying width and color—harken back to his early Circles. By 2001, the artist had moved from Santa Barbara, California to Port Clyde, Maine, and the landscape and light of the East Coast captured his imagination and influenced his work in new ways.

The latest works in the survey, dating to 2006, are from Noland’s Into the Cool series. These joyous compositions speak to the emotional effects and expressive potential of color and form, reflecting the artist’s enduring love of jazz in their jaunty, gestural abstractions. Though he returned to the image of the circle in his Into the Cool paintings, Kenneth Noland approached color through subtle tone and transparency, moving away from the hard-edge style of his earlier work.

Up until his last works, Kenneth Noland continued pushing his investigations of color and shape to new limits. Today, his work can be found in major museum collections around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo; Tate in London; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, among many others.

Pace’s Noland survey is the first presentation dedicated to his work to be mounted in Seoul since 1995, when he exhibited at Gana Art Gallery, and the first in Tokyo since 1986, when he showed at Satani Gallery.

Kenneth Noland (b. 1924, Asheville, North Carolina; d. 2010, Port Clyde, Maine), a key figure in the development of postwar abstract art, studied under Ilya Bolotowsky at Black Mountain College from 1946 to 1948, developing an early interest in the emotional effects and expressive potential of color and geometric form. A commitment to line and color can be traced throughout his oeuvre—one essential to the development of Color-field painting—beginning with his Circle paintings and extending through a visual language that includes chevrons, diamonds, horizontal bands, plaid patterns, and shaped canvases. Often adhering to a compositional format, Noland worked methodically within a series to explore color, material, and method—a working process that generated successive forms.

PACE SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

PACE TOKYO

1F; Azabudai Hills Garden Plaza-A

5-8-1 Toranomon, Minato-ku, Tokyo

www.pacegallery.com