Sam Gilliam

Lilly

Sam Gilliam’s 2022 work, Lilly, is energized, colorful, monumental in size, and extraordinarily tactile. The work may appear flat from the front, but its beveled frame gives the painting a depth of six inches. This allows the work to emerge from the wall, acting as an extension of the flat plane and broaching the space between the wall and the viewer. After spending much of his career staining and draping unstretched canvases, Gilliam returns to his 1960s and 1970s practice of using beveled-edge stretchers on his canvases with Lilly. Instead of staining the canvas with diluted acrylic paint, which was the traditional technique used by the second wave of Color Field painters, Gilliam introduces a variety of materials, including sawdust and wax, to create a textured and mature take on his beveled-edge canvas. Made in the final year of the artist’s life, Lilly conjoins the improvisational spirit of Gilliam’s early work with the tactility and movement his art gained throughout his career.