Adolph Gottlieb and Kim Whanki @ Pace Gallery, Seoul - 'The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion' Exhibition

The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion 

Adolph Gottlieb and Kim Whanki

Pace Gallery, Seoul

October 31, 2025 – January 10, 2026

Kim Whanki 

Untitled, 1967 

Oil on canvas, 177 x 127 cm 

© Whanki Foundation · Whanki Museum

Pace  presents The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion, a pair of exhibitions of works by American Abstract Expressionist Adolph Gottlieb and pioneering Korean painter Kim Whanki, at its Seoul gallery. On view across two floors of the gallery, these dual presentations—organized in collaboration with the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation and the Whanki Foundation—offer viewers an opportunity to witness how two 20th century figures with different cultural and philosophical backgrounds visualized their unique perspectives and forged a universal language through abstraction.

Gottlieb’s paintings fuse intuitive shapes with bold color fields to visualize emotion and the unconscious, while Kim’s canvases employ repeated dots and refined chromatic structures to evoke an Eastern sense of meditation and cosmic order. Deeply moved by his first encounter with Gottlieb’s work in the U.S. Pavilion at the São Paulo Biennale in 1963, Kim Whanki subsequently relocated to New York, where he embarked on one of the most intense periods of his career. Immersed in the city’s dynamic art scene, he gradually eliminated figurative references from his work, refining his language into dots, lines, and planes. His restrained compositions and luminous fields of meticulously placed dots evoke skies, seas, and constellations, transforming time and space into poetic abstractions. His celebrated Dot Paintings series, completed during these years, played a key role in the introduction of Korean Modernism to the global stage. Pace’s exhibition of Kim’s work from the late 1960s to the early 1970s focuses on the development of his Dot Paintings from structural compositions using crosses and quadrants (Sibjagudo).

A central figure of the New York School alongside Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb was at the vanguard of American Abstract Expressionism. His Pictographs of the 1940s used an all-over grid structure and invented symbols to give form to the unconscious, and in the 1950s he developed his signature Burst series: paintings that juxtapose a floating orb with explosive brushwork. These compositions dramatize the tensions between order and chaos, color, and form, inviting universal and intuitive responses rather than prescribing narrative meaning. Pace’s presentation in Seoul includes a selection of works produced by Adolph Gottlieb during the 1960s and 1970s, including the large-scale painting Expanding (1962), along with canvases from his Imaginary Landscapes series, which utilize the form of landscape painting to include unlimited perception.

Though their practices were rooted in distinct cultural contexts, Kim and Gottlieb are connected by a shared pursuit of universality—using color, symbol, and structure to explore humanity, the cosmos, and the realm of emotion. The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion is conceived as a dialogue, where the visual and emotional resonances between their works illuminate the boundless possibilities of abstraction and its enduring significance in art history.

Adolph Gottlieb (b. 1903, New York; d. 1974, New York) is recognized as a key figure of the New York School. Initially informed by Italian Renaissance painting, Impressionism, and the European avant-garde, Gottlieb became an advocate of abstraction from the 1930s onward, notably organizing the protest of an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1950, for which he and a group of fellow artists became known as the Irascibles. Producing paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and tapestries, Adolph Gottlieb developed an aesthetic vocabulary from Jungian theory, underpinned by aspects of automatism, primitivism, and Surrealism. He continued to refine these stylistic means throughout his career, pursuing images that evoke an immediate and visceral impact on the viewer, through his series of Pictographs, Imaginary Landscapes, and Bursts.

Kim Whanki (b. 1913, Jeollanam-do, Korea; d. 1974, New York) is recognized as one of the pioneers of abstract modernism in South Korea during the twentieth century. The artist studied at Nihon University, Tokyo, from 1933 to 1936, a period during which he began exploring abstraction. From 1946 to 1950, he served as a professor in the Department of Western Painting at Seoul National University, and from 1952 to 1955 as professor and dean of the Department of Western Painting at Hongik University, Seoul. He was appointed as President of the Fine Arts Association in 1963.

PACE SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

www.pacegallery.com

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

Liza Lou: Painting @ Lehmann Maupin, NYC

Liza Lou: Painting

Lehmann Maupin, New York

September 5 – October 12, 2024

Lehmann Maupin presents Liza Lou: Painting, an exhibition of new work by the Los Angeles-based artist. Spanning the gallery’s New York location, the exhibition features a series of abstract works on canvas in which Liza Lou explores the most singular feature of a painting—the brushstroke. Activating the intense chroma and refractive qualities of glass beads, Liza Lou uses her signature material to flow and coagulate into a new form of paint, applying beads in free-form gestures through an intuitive approach. As they collide and overlap on the canvas, Lou’s beads reconstruct strokes of paint, an often-fetishized aspect of mid-century American Abstraction. Concurrent to this exhibition, Liza Lou’s landmark Trailer (1998–2000), will be installed (opens September 13, 2024) in the Brooklyn Museum lobby gallery; it is a recent addition to the permanent collection and will debut at the museum in September, offering an opportunity to experience the artist’s most recent work alongside this rarely-seen immersive sculpture.  

In a career spanning three decades, Liza Lou has become widely known for introducing beads as a contemporary fine art medium. Her persistent experimentation has challenged hierarchies and injected humor and glamour into a Feminist vision. Lou’s project is an open-ended investigation into the metaphoric possibilities of a humble material to draw attention to the poetic and painful dimensions of labor, the artistic process, and the complexities of American life. 

In this new series of paintings, Liza Lou renders what appear as quick, painterly gestures in grain-by-grain minutiae. Beads naturally resist blending or mixing; thus, Lou renews Frank Stella’s admonition to “paint as good as in the tube,” applying pure color directly to canvas. The placement and color of each paint stroke is predicated in the moment, purely in reaction to the stroke preceding it. In an aesthetic call and response, colors are superimposed or juxtaposed, reveling in joyful adjacencies. Bright chroma radiates across the canvas in vivid jabs while lattice work builds up and propels itself outward. At close range, the tiny, individual 3-dimensional pieces of factory-made color jostle each other, resulting in micro explosions that register as surprise, offering a new take on American Abstract painting. 

Known for her community-based approach, Liza Lou’s current work emerges from a period of solitude spent living and working alone in the Mojave desert in Southern California. From this undiluted experience in nature, Lou reveals a close look at the act of painting itself, magnifying granular gestures and, as she has described, “listening to the material.” Together, Lou’s exhibitions at Lehmann Maupin and the Brooklyn Museum provide portals into the evolution of Lou’s decades-long practice—one centered in materiality, invention, and possibility.

LEHMANN MAUPIN NEW YORK

501 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Yoo Youngkuk @ Pace Gallery, NYC - "Moutain Within" Exhibition

Yoo Youngkuk: Mountain Within

Pace Gallery, New York

November 10 – December 22, 2023

YOO YOUNGKUK

Work, 1973 

© Yoo Youngkuk Art Foundation, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents an exhibition of paintings by YOO YOUNGKUK, a hugely influential 20th century Korean abstractionist, at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. This show, titled Mountain Within, marks the first-ever solo presentation of Yoo’s work outside Korea.

Born in 1916 in Uljin, South Korea, Yoo Youngkuk  was a pioneer of geometric abstract painting. His distinctive visual lexicon is characterized by bold color fields and expressive applications of paint. With his unique approach to color, form, and space, Yoo took up a steadfast and passionate investigation of his personal relationship with nature, capturing the majesty of the natural world—particularly the varied landscape of Uljin—through acts of painterly distillation that would lean increasingly into abstract territory.

Yoo began studying painting under artist Murai Masanari at Bunka Gakuin University in Tokyo in 1935, nurturing his interest in abstraction and making a name for himself in the Japanese art world. He returned to Korea in 1943, and the next decade of his life and career would be punctuated by several historic crises, including the Pacific War of World War II and the Korean War. During periods of relocation and prolonged breaks from painting precipitated by these upheavals, Yoo’s commitment to his artistic practice never wavered.

Political and social turmoil played a significant role in shaping the artist’s worldview, which was marked by an appreciation for and deep understanding of the fragility of life. His first-hand experiences of such chaos led him to adopt mountain-like forms—symbols of stability and endurance—as recurring motifs in his paintings.

“As his nation struggled to rise from the ashes of war, he felt that abstract art, with its rejection of pathos, could be the embodiment of the new life and art of Korea,” Kim Inhye, curator at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Korea, wrote in Rizzoli’s 2020 monograph on Yoo Youngkuk.

Marking Yoo’s first exhibition with Pace since the gallery began representing his estate in the US and Europe earlier this year, the upcoming presentation of the artist’s work in New York will include a selection of richly hued paintings created between 1965 and 1995, with a focus on his practice during the 1960s. During this decade, the artist pursued a formal demarcation of space in his compositions, creating lyrical, nuanced plays of color and form, both geometric and biomorphic. Paintings from the 1980s and 1990s featured in the exhibition offer viewers a look at the artist’s later career, when, despite prolonged health struggles, his abstractions took on greater dynamism and crispness than previous decades. Together, the vibrant, luminous works in this landmark presentation will speak to Yoo’s lifelong belief in the spiritual and poetic power of abstraction—he often said that he was in pursuit of “absolute freedom” through his painting practice.

Yoo, who died in 2002, left an indelible mark on the history of art in Korea. He helped form several avant-garde groups in the country in the 1950s and 1960s, including the Modern Art Association, the Contemporary Artists, and New Figures, but his legacy extends beyond the country’s modernist movement and remains deeply felt in the country’s cultural and aesthetic fabric today.

Despite Yoo’s prominence in Korean art history, his practice is lesser known to international audiences. In 2016, the centenary of Yoo’s birth, a retrospective of his work was presented at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul and the Busan Museum of Art. Pace’s forthcoming presentation of his work will be the artist’s first-ever solo show in New York and, more broadly, the United States.

Throughout his nearly seven-decade career, YOO YOUNGKUK (b. 1916, Uljin-gun, South Korea; d. 2002, Seoul, South Korea) founded several vital artistic groups in Japan and Korea that blazed a trail for generations of avant-garde artists. A pioneer of geometric abstract painting, his distinctive visual lexicon is characterized by bold color fields and an expressive application of paint. At the core of Yoo’s practice is a steadfast and passionate engagement with the distillation of painterly forms as a means of investigating his deeply personal relationship to nature.

As a young man, becoming a painter represented a kind of freedom for Yoo. It opened the door to communities of like-minded artists and offered an outlet for his rich inner world. Experimenting with an array of materials and techniques, including wood relief, photography, and painting, early influences of Russian Constructivism, Suprematism, and Neo-Plasticism are keenly felt in Yoo’s work. Regardless of the material, the artist’s use of color, form, and space expertly captured the brilliance and majesty of nature while maintaining a distinctly abstract sensibility.

Yoo’s life was punctuated by multiple historic upheavals, including World War II and the Korean War. These periods of crisis enforced relocation and prolonged breaks from painting, but only strengthened Yoo’s commitment to his artistic practice. His unwavering dedication garnered significant critical engagement and several major institutional exhibitions across Korea. Against the fragility of daily life caused by the turmoil of global conflict, mountains became a signature motif in the artist’s paintings, serving as symbols of stability and endurance. Art historian and curator Dr. Gabriel Ritter explained, ‘For Yoo, the rocky summit of Mount Seoraksan and the tree-covered Taebaek mountain range were to become the embodiment of nature and Korea itself, and a constant.

PACE GALLERY

540 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Sam Gilliam: Late Paintings @ Pace Gallery, London

Sam Gilliam: Late Paintings

Pace Gallery, London

October 11 – November 12, 2022

SAM GILLIAM

Oak, Net and This!, 2021

Acrylic on canvas, bevelled edge

243.8 cm × 243.8 cm × 10.2 cm 

© Sam Gilliam, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace Gallery presents Sam Gilliam: Late Paintings, a landmark exhibition of late works by one of the most celebrated figures in post-war American art.

Debuting a suite of large-scale paintings and works on paper executed in the last two years of his life, Late Paintings is a testament to Sam Gilliam’s remarkable and unflagging commitment to abstraction. Conceived together with the artist prior to his death in June of 2022, the exhibition occupies the entirety of Pace’s Hanover Square gallery. It marks Sam Gilliam’s first ever solo presentation in the United Kingdom.

Throughout his nearly seven-decade career, Sam Gilliam invented and continuously reinvented a singular and deeply influential approach to abstraction, working both with paint and with the canvas itself in radically new and revolutionary ways. A leading member of the Washington Color School in the 1960s, Gilliam’s paintings, sculptures, and installations continued to draw on myriad influences including music, poetry, and politics throughout his career. For Gilliam, art and life were inextricably entwined—the world of his paintings flowed directly from the dramatis personae of his own social and familial existence. The titles of his artworks make reference to a wide range of aspects from everyday life: significant sites of memory; cultural icons from music, poetry, and popular culture, from Ornette Coleman to Beyoncé; and most of all close friends, family members and loved ones, in particular the artist’s wife, Annie.

The monumental late paintings embody the apotheosis of Sam Gilliam’s work with the bevelled-edge canvas, which he pioneered in the late 1960s. His late abstractions are material landscapes, built up from fields of densely layered and richly saturated pigment, applied through a vast range of expressive gestures and experimental techniques of mark-making. The extraordinary surfaces of Gilliam’s paintings buzz with materiality, achieved through the alchemic mixing of acrylic paint with a wide variety of non-traditional agents and materials, from sawdust to powdered metals. Gilliam manipulated the wet surfaces using a range of everyday tools and innovative techniques, from fishing net to garden rakes, scraping away and scoring the layers of pigment to produce a dazzling range of chromatic and formal interactions. The resulting compositions vibrate, suggesting the raw energies of nature itself.

Sam Gilliam developed the bevelled-edge paintings in tandem with his Drape series, in which he freed the canvas from its support, treating painting as a sculptural object by draping the work in cascading folds suspended in space, eschewing conventions of painting’s edges, front, or back. Gilliam’s concurrent experimentation with shaped supports pursued a parallel path that was similarly concerned with painting’s objecthood and its material presence: the bevelled-edge paintings, in which he stretched canvas over a bespoke strainer, imbue these wall- bound abstractions with a sculptural immediacy that makes physical the ecstatic and visceral possibilities of color. Finding kinship in the improvisatory spirit of jazz, which also embraces chromatic invention, Gilliam’s painting was intuitive, bodily, and responsive. “The studio is as much of a performance space as it is a painting space,” Gilliam once explained.

For Sam Gilliam, abstraction was never merely formalism; color, gesture, and materiality offered a means for exploring fundamental questions about what it meant to be human. Throughout his career, Gilliam often hinted that although his paintings were entirely abstract, they remained rooted in the specificity of his own particular experiences as a Black artist born and raised in the American South in the 1930s and 1940s. During the late 1960s, Sam Gilliam’s radical departure from hard-edged Color Field abstractions toward a new, freer mode of experimentation coincided with radical upheavals in American society and politics, in particular the seminal events of the Civil Rights movement, to which the titles of several works of the period make reference.

In addition to large-scale acrylic on canvas paintings, the exhibition also includes a suite of Sam Gilliam’s masterful watercolors on washi paper that relate to his ongoing Slice series, which he also began in the late 1960s. Throughout his career Gilliam developed a practice of creating works in watercolor on paper, which explore the medium’s distinct material properties. Over the last several decades of his life, Gilliam worked with a specialist paper supplier in Japan to achieve a precise quality of washi that was delicate enough to hold pigment in its purest state and durable enough for him to fold and paint in a manner reminiscent of his Slice paintings on canvas, as if it were “origami, or even ritual games I would play as a kid, like a cat’s cradle, a game with strings,” Gilliam explained, before soaking the support in rich, jewel-toned pigments. Once unfurled, the large-scale works reveal dynamic, vibrant compositions that represent a masterfully orchestrated collaboration between the careful calibration of color and the spontaneous irruption of form.

Pace and David Kordansky Gallery announce that research has commenced on a Sam Gilliam Catalogue Raisonné project, to be published by Cahiers d’Art Institute. 

SAM GILLIAM (b. 1933, Tupelo, Mississippi, d. 2022, Washington D.C.) is 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 Color School painting. 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 stretcher-less 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. As an African-American 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. Gilliam has subsequently pursued a pioneering course in which experimentation has been the only constant. Inspired by the improvisatory ethos of jazz, his lyrical abstractions continue to take on an increasing variety of forms, moods, and materials. A major exhibition, Sam Gilliam: Full Circle, was recently presented at the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. In addition to a traveling retrospective organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. in 2005, Sam Gilliam has been the subject of several significant solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1971); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (1982); Whitney Museum of American Art, Philip Morris Branch, New York (1993); J.B. Speed Memorial Museum, Louisville, Kentucky (1996); Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (2011); and Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2018), among many other institutions. A semi-permanent installation of Sam Gilliam’s paintings opened at Dia:Beacon in August 2019. His work is included in over fifty public collections, including those of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Art Institute of Chicago. Sam Gilliam passed away in June 2022 aged 88.

PACE GALLERY

5 Hanover Square, London

www.pacegallery.com

Cathy Wilkes @ Ortuzar Projects Gallery, NYC

Cathy Wilkes

Ortuzar Projects, New York

September 9 – October 22, 2022

Ortuzar Projects presents an exhibition by Cathy Wilkes, the artist’s first presentation in New York since her acclaimed solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 in 2017. The new installation combines subtle paintings, objects, and Cathy Wilkes’ characteristic papier-mâché figures. Inchoate visions of landscapes and interiors from her childhood are often recognizable in the work, collapsing and reforming time and space repeatedly. Employing what the artist has called “hypostatic abstraction and intense social realism,” the exhibition conveys themes of separation, suffering, infancy, and fragility.

Cathy Wilkes grew up in Northern Ireland. Her new work contends with the lingering after effects of her childhood, meditating on brutality, loss, and continuity. The softness of her presentation creates a zone of eerie uncertainty, anxiety, and empathy—a space of contemplation in which viewers are invited to look and look anew. Quietly preternatural objects—modestly intimate in their presentation—gradually accumulate in “a process of open concentration and waiting.”

Evoking the banalities of a lived life and the pathos inherent to it, Wilkes builds an enigmatic language told through objects and the oft-unperceived emotional states that accompany them. The evocative assemblages give access to a fiercely private inner world, disturbing and reassigning the relationship between subject and object.

The smallest particle of suffering is the object, and I, the subject who acts upon the object, am every atom unfolding from the womb. An atom here among us and another atom in a far away galaxy are inseparable epitomes of the same.

I solemnise and dignify the ghosts of interference which proceed from their origin and whip themselves up before me. I observe, they nucleate and propagate. If I could disappear, how fluid, how graceful and unending, how undisturbed and unpredictable would be the changing patterns thereabout.

On both the left and on the right there is nothing worth seeing and nothing worth hearing. I return home to wait in place and draw forth what is yet to come.

In proximity to so much violence and death, propinquity resulted in introversion. So much talk on that line and all the worry about it buried us all. We weren’t used to looking at things in what you would call, the light.

We lived hoping nothing would happen. I was the oppressor, how could I be the liberator? We associated resistance with violence and destitution. Nobody resisted if they could help it. We were hiding, believing erroneously that nothing could be done. In a blockade of inimical forces, one moved quietly and carefully so as not to disturb anything. As a child I wanted to be as small as an atom, even a lepton or a quark. I am an epitome and a subsistent operator.

CATHY WILKES (b. 1966, Belfast) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Modern Institute, Glasgow, Scotland (2021), Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, Belgium (2021); BQ, Berlin, Germany (2021); Venice Biennale, British Pavilion, Venice, Italy (2019); and MoMA PS1, New York (2017). Select group exhibitions include One is always a plural, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland (2021), Psychic Wounds: On Art & Trauma, The Warehouse, Dallas, Texas (2021), and The State We Are In. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw at the Galeria Labirynt in Lublin, Galeria Labirynt, Lublin, Poland (2018). Her work is in the public collections of the Royal Ulster Museum, Belfast, Northern Ireland, Tate, London, England, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland, Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, among many others. She lives and works in Glasgow.

ORTUZAR PROJECTS

9 White Street, New York, NY 10013

www.ortuzarprojects.com

______________