Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Sam Gilliam
American; 20th-century
New York, NY: Pace Gallery (Exhibition: Sam Gilliam: Stitched)
47%
Untitled. 1994. Acrylic, thread, fabric
Gilliam's work is only ever good to the extent that it convinces you that there's more to all his flowing fabrics and uncontrolled colors than the fact that, in the history of painting, he got there first. This is to say that sometimes Gilliam proves that there's deliberation behind the ways his canvases fall and their soaked colors clash, but other times he relies too heavily on the quasi-sculptural funkiness of his designs to make up for the fact that they're not very thoughtfully arranged. This piece is on the borderline: its tie-dye palette is inexcusable and because of that the many scraps of fabric fail to ever gel in painterly terms, but then the way it's stitched together is clearly intentioned, and the varied shapes of all the swatches by turns interact with and work against the physique of the object overall. (Look at the way, for instance, that interrupted band of diagonal red in the bottom portion sits on the crest of a crumple, or how that blue quadrilateral at upper right pokes towards the outermost corner of the piece.) There are many discrete pleasures here, but they fail to amount to a totality — this artwork is less than the sum of its parts. (TFS, 2026)