Sam Gilliam: The Last Five Years

Late works from the abstract painter devoted to pictorial disruption and vivacious color work

DC-based painter Sam Gilliam (1933–2022) paved a distinct course through abstraction by way of tireless formal, material and tonal experimentation. During the late 1960s, Gilliam advanced the processes and aesthetics employed by the Color Field painters while radically disrupting the Greenbergian ideal of the contained picture plane. This robust period of output yielded his canonical Beveled-edge and Drape series, which he spent decades elaborating upon.
Sam Gilliam: The Last Five Years presents a suite of works created by the late artist in the final years of his life, encompassing arresting variations on his iconic tondos, drapes and beveled-edge paintings. Replete with photographs and foldouts as well as an essay by acclaimed art historian Lowery Stokes Sims, this volume offers an all-encompassing look at Gilliam’s dynamic, vibrant compositions.