Stitched

In 1993, Sam Gilliam was accepted as the artist in residence at Ballinglen Arts Foundation in the rural north of Ireland and went to ship his usual paints to the residency. When the paints were barred from shipment because they contained highly flammable petroleum, Gilliam found himself in a dire circumstance that called for innovation. At his studio in Washington D.C., Gilliam painted and stained a large group of monumental loose canvases, folded them up, and shipped them to Ballinglen. These canvases became the source material for a new body of work he produces in Ireland—for a painting residency during which he did no actual painting. Once on site, Gilliam hires a local seamstress and works alongside her every day, cutting and stitching the pre-painted canvases to construct brand new paintings from the found material of his own creation. The results are dynamic three-dimensional wall works and hanging sculptures, vibrant compositions of colliding and coalescing geometries and colors which defy easy categorization as painting or sculpture. Gilliam's stitched works are perhaps best understood as Constructivist objects, which reflect his tireless spirit of invention, much like the circumstances of their own creation. Three decades later, many of these works are shown for the first time in 'Sam Gilliam: Sewing Fields' at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin in 2025. Sam Gilliam: Stitched expands upon the IMMA exhibition. The gallery's presentation features many of the wall-mounted works that are the focus of IMMA's exhibition, as well as never-before-seen volumetric, balloon-like hanging sculptures from the same period. The exhibition marks the United States debut for all included works, and the global debut for several others. Often credited with freeing the canvas from its support, Gilliam breaks down the distinctions between painting and sculpture throughout his career. In many ways, these stitched works from the 1990s are the product of Gilliam's lifelong interest in Constructivism, and they bridge his canonical early-career Drape paintings with his late work, last shown at Pace in 2023. "I'd call myself a mirror," the artist once said. "A mirror that reflects, borrows, and steals from different art movements, reorienting them in order to squeeze out new life." Widely recognized as one of the boldest figures of postwar American painting, Gilliam emerges from Washington, D.C. in the mid-1960s with works that elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of Color School painting. Drawing inspiration from the improvisatory nature of jazz and the history of art itself, he nurtures a radical vision that extended the traditional boundaries of art. Through his investigations of technique, gesture, materiality, color, and space, Gilliam continually reinvents his practice to pursue a lifelong inquiry into the expressive, aesthetic, and philosophical powers of abstraction.

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