Prints & Multiples

Sale 1059

Live

| Chicago

Sep 29 | 11:00 AM EDT

Live

| Chicago

Lot 21

Lot 21

Sepik #16

Status:

Closed

Estimate: $3,000 - $5,000

Estimate$3,000 – $5,000

Status

Closed

Sam Gilliam

(American, 1933-2022)

Sepik #16

, 1975

relief print on handmade paper

signed, dated, titled, and numbered 16 in pencil

16 x 16 inches.

Property from the Estate of Joseph Wilfer, Pace Prints Master Printer

Lot Note:

Sam Gilliam challenged the foundations of every medium he put his hand to, and the print studio offered a playground of materials and techniques. He is perhaps best remembered for his experiments with color field painting in the 1970s. His canvases were draped and suspended – like the sheets hanging from the clothesline he could see outside his Washington studio – breaking away from the rigid forms of the stretcher that had dominated painting since the introduction of stretched canvas paintings in the sixteenth century.

He began his career in the 1960s and ‘70s as part of the Washington Color School, coming to art during the tumultuous years of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement. As a Black artist, Gilliam was largely ignored by the mainstream art world until late in his career. Nonetheless, he continued to interrogate materiality and its associations in African American culture. Though many of his Black contemporaries used easily identifiable imagery to speak to the Black experience, Gilliam was devoted to abstraction. His experiments included layered materials, collage, and overlaid forms in the composition that reference, for example, quiltmaking traditions. These experiments moved his editioned artworks away from their traditional place on a rectilinear sheet of paper, allowing each to be an encrusted and freestanding form with rich impasto and spontaneity.

Unframed. Rippling to paper, and imperfections likely all inherent to papermaking process; uneven toning to sheet; instances of surface dust. Please request additional images.

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Please email fineart@hindmanauctions.com for any additional information or questions you may have regarding this lot.

Monica Brown

Managing Director, Vice President, Fine Art, Head of Department, Prints and Multiples

monicabrown@freemansauction.com 303.825.1855

Ms. Brown rejoined the firm in 2019 as a senior specialist in the Fine Art department, where she has been the resident expert and Head of Sale for Prints and Multiples. She has over 17 years of art-market experience, most recently as founder of Monica Brown Fine Art. In addition to working for renowned auction houses, she has extensive knowledge in over five centuries of works on paper from her tenure at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and eight years of experience with one of London’s leading dealers of Pop Art editions.

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Prints & Multiples

Sepik #16

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