Sam Gilliam Exhibition: A Retrospective

Exhibition - Sam Gilliam: A Retrospective
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC USA
Saturday, October 15, 2005 - Sunday, January 22, 2006


This exhibition marks the first full-scale retrospective of the art of Sam Gilliam. The most extensive presentation of the artist's career to date, it will be accompanied by a fully illustrated monograph, also a first for the artist. Featuring approximately 50 of Gilliam's paintings, elaborate mixed-media constructions and installations, A Retrospective is a celebration of a magisterial post-1960s artist, and one of the most important artists to have lived and worked in Washington, DC.

Sam Gilliam first achieved widespread acclaim in the late 1960s and early 1970s with a string of exhibitions in major museums and international art venues. Now into his fifth decade as an artist, significant examples of his work may be found in the permanent collections of almost every major US museum, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Throughout the years, Gilliam's paintings have ranged from sheer and economical evocations of color, light, and space to complex, mixed-media, and multi-dimensional sculptural conglomerations. His idea that modernist painting could be sculptural and, moreover, theatrical, radically distinguished him from his contemporaries, including minimalists Donald Judd and Robert Morris, color-field painter Helen Frankenthaler, and the artists associated with the Washington Color School, such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. A Retrospective emphasizes Gilliam's many innovations while demonstrating the aesthetic ideals that have remained consistent throughout his career, most important among them his disregard for the boundaries that have traditionally separated the disciplines of painting, sculpture, and architecture.

For more than forty years now, Sam Gilliam has pursued new aesthetic experiences without regard for theoretical prescriptions, political dictates, or marketplace partiality for a singular signature style. The art he has created in the process stands as a testament to the continued vitality of abstraction in the 21st century.

General Information

Corcoran Gallery of Art
Address: 500 17th Street, NW
Washington, DC USA
Phone: 202-639-1700

Hours: Wednesday - Sunday 10 am - 5 pm
Closed Mondays and Tuesday (Open holiday Mondays)
Extended hours Thursday evenings until 9 pm (except Thanksgiving)
Metro: Farragut West (Orange and Blue lines) or Farragut North (Red line)

www.annemarchand.com