The Music of Color. Sam Gilliam, 1967–1973

Sam Gilliam (b. Tupelo, Mississippi, 1933) is one of America’s most prominent abstract painters: his first solo show in Europe, “The Music of Color” presents around 50 works from public and private collections in Europe and the United States. The show puts the focus on the years between 1967 and 1973, the period of the greatest radicalism in Gilliam’s oeuvre: paintings he started working on in 1967 pouring acrylic paint directly onto the unprimed canvas, which he folded and crumpled while the paint was still wet.“The Music of Color” also presents the political and historical dimension of Gilliam’s oeuvre: the works in his Martin Luther King series and Jail Jungle reflect the 1968 race riots and the highly polarised debate over black art and abstract painting in 1960s and 1970s America.