Art Of The Day Weekly
#519 - from 14 June 2018 to 20 June 2018
Sam Gilliam, Crystal, 1973, acrylic on canvas, 236 x 75 x 19 cm. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen, Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles © 2018, ProLitteris, Zurich.
Gilliam adored at Basel
BASEL – Among the Gilliam family, we all know Terry, the head of the Monty Python recently back in the limelight due to his endless legal and cinematographic saga focused on his Don Quijote. But this name of Normand origin (derived from Guillaume-William-) has other respectable bearers, among them Sam, a painter born in Tupelo in Mississippi in 1933, an apostle of his race (he was the first black American painter to represent the United States at the Biennale of Venice, in 1972, where he came back in 2017), and of colors. He was conveniently (convenient for whom?) classified as an Abstract Expressionist, and became a specialist of his own type of drape by presenting paintings without a frame, reminiscent of the linen washwomen put out to dry. The series he did as of 1968, in the middle of the turmoil of all the demands against white power, is presented in the rooms of the Kunstmuseum, while his paintings are the craze at Art Basel, where they are auctioned for nearly one million dollars. This is a belated but important recognition at a time when other Afro-American artists such as Kerry James Marshall or David Hammons occupy the front of the stage.
• Sam Gilliam, the Music of Color, at the Kunstmuseum, from 6 June to 30 September 2018.