Ochre, cobalt, rusty orange, soft, feathery mauve, emerald green – Atmosphere is like walking through pineapple rain or pushing past a beaded curtain into a space where the rules of gravity crease into kaleidoscopic variation. Towering in scale and enveloping in color, Atmosphere is what the title suggests: an effervescent stratosphere undulating in waves of warm and cool. Vertical bars of color bleed into one another, while the hard edge of distinct lines remain, generating a rich staccato marching the length of canvas like music. Stretched canvas tapers off into a beveled edge, staking its claim in three dimensions, existing as both image and monument. If all that is solid melts into air, Gilliam takes the essence of vapor and bends it into sublime sculptural form. A painting that soars as much as it drips, Atmosphere was executed in 1972, the year Gilliam showed as the first African American painter to represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale.
“[Sam Gilliam] can’t help but be concerned with (the abolition of) the metaphysic of painting, bending it toward sculpture, folding it into music, letting it hang with performance so that in the coordination of his hand and our eye, painting is beside itself.”
Image © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, NY
Art © 2021 MICA, Rights administered by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Atmosphere is field, substratum, luminescent fog. Through tonal shifts, Gilliam’s painting is traversable terrain, a landscape to be passed through or entered, without relying on static perspective. Tactile in its engagement with material, haptic in its way of drawing in the viewer, Atmosphere transcends rudimentary painting. Attaching the flat plane of canvas to beveled stretchers, Atmosphere is an innovative inquiry into how the eye perceives volumetric structure. The painting activates its surroundings by projecting away from the wall, expanding in width, and pointing towards the floor and ceiling through the orientation of its graphic image. Gilliam’s painting is like a canopy, casting amorous shade beneath its ascending arc, suspended across space and time.
Sam Gilliam Works in Important Institutional Collections
“While you feel the weight of the wooden supports, your gaze loses itself in something like starry skies: dizzying impressions of infinite distance in tension with the dense grounds… Registering the jittery chromatic harmonies and occasional underlying structures – ghosts of geometry – takes time.”
Digital Image © Whitney Museum of American Art / Licensed by Scala / Art Resource, NY
Art © 2021 Helen Frankenthaler / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
One foot still in the Greenbergian era of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, Gilliam tests the boundaries between geometric and organic shape, staging discernable patterns while leaving room for improvisation. Gilliam’s is a scientific approach to technique, forming tested hypotheses related to fiber and pigment. Doing away with traditional approaches to painting, Gilliam experiments with staining, soaking, and pouring pigment. Taking advantage of the inherently flexible structure of canvas, Gilliam folds the surface onto itself while still wet, developing fluid, unbound effects. Distilling the way paint can form pools and unpredictable marks on a surface, his technique is a thoroughly researched method. “I pour to experience the effect of gravity. I find that when these effects have to operate within measured limits they must be precalculated at definite intervals along the horizontal length of the canvas.” (Sam Gilliam in conversation with Donald Miller, “Hanging loose: An interview with Sam Gilliam,” ARTnews, January 1973) While bodily in his involved production process, Gilliam ultimately erases the trace of his hand by letting physics do the work. A lightning rod in the art historical canon of US abstraction, Gilliam is showcased in prominent permanent collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; and the Art Institute of Chicago.