Sam Gilliam - American Contemporary Art

Sam Gilliam (1933 – 2022) was an American color field painter and lyrical abstractionist artist. Gilliam was associated with the Washington Color School, a group of Washington, D.C.-area artists that developed a form of abstract art from color field painting in the 1950s and 1960s. His works have also been described as belonging to abstract expressionism and lyrical abstraction. He worked on stretched, draped and wrapped canvas, and added sculptural 3D elements. He was recognized as the first artist to introduce the idea of a draped, painted canvas hanging without stretcher bars around 1965. This was a major contribution to the Color Field School and has had a lasting impact on the contemporary art canon

"Sam Gilliam is one of the great innovators in postwar American painting. He emerged from the Washington, D.C. scene in the mid 1960s with works that elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of Color School painting.A series of formal breakthroughs would soon result in his canonical Drape paintings, which expanded upon the tenets of Abstract Expressionism in entirely new ways. Suspending stretcherless lengths of painted canvas from the walls or ceilings of exhibition spaces, Gilliam transformed his medium and the contexts in which it was viewed. As an African-American artist in the nation’s capital at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, this was not merely an aesthetic proposition; it was a way of defining art’s role in a society undergoing dramatic change. Gilliam has subsequently pursued a pioneering course in which experimentation has been the only constant. Inspired by the improvisatory ethos of jazz, his lyrical abstractions continue to take on an increasing variety of forms, moods, and materials."(pacegallery.com) 

 

 

Ingemar Härdelin

 

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Fumio Nambata

 

 When Fumio Nambata fell off a ferry in 1974 while crossing the Seto Insland Sea his life was cut short at the age of 32. His artistic career, too, met an untimely end of just about 15 years. Nambata, the son of an artists and a painter himself, lived through tumultuous times: rapid economic development and social turmoil. And for Nambata they were anything but calm. He managed to create more than 2000 paintings, an astounding number for such a young artist. About 300 of his paintings are now part of an exhibition on display at the Setagaya Art Museum in Tokyo.The 1960s “was a unique period of free expression,” explains the Setagaya Art Museum. Most of Nambata’s images are watercolor-and-ink depictions of an imaginary world. “Nambata conjured a profusion of images that he painted in his own free style, unimpeded by the considerations of realism and composition that are ordinarily fundamental to painting.” 

 

 

Milena Olesinska - Abstract Artwork

 

 Abstract art uses visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. 

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Manuel Felguérez Barra

 

 Manuel Felguérez Barra (1928 – 2020) was a Mexican abstract artist, part of the Generación de la Ruptura that broke with the muralist movement of Diego Rivera and others in the mid 20th century.
"Painter and sculptor. In the late forties, he studied at the San Carlos Academy in Mexico City. At the beginning of the fifties, thanks to a scholarship from the French government he traveled to Paris where he studied at the Academy de la Grande Chaumier and at the Colarossi Academy. There he perfected his sculptural work with the master Ossip Zadkine, whose work will influence the young Felguérez. In the mid-fifties he became one of the pioneers of the Abstract trend, provoking a true renewal of the Mexican visual arts landscape in the second half of the XX century. Between 1965 and 1990 he developed an intense teaching and research work that took him to Cornell University and Harvard University in the United States. He tought Composition Classes in the National School of Plastic Arts and 1977 he became a researcher at the Institute of Aesthetic Research at UNAM. The work of Felguérez poses a dialectic between abstraction and expression. His paintings articulate geometric figures as squares, triangles, circles or rectangles, that collides with the imprint of an expressive Informalism charged with gestural spontaneity."(durbansegnini.com)