[Online Exhibition] David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to present One-on-One: Sam Gilliam, Harmony, featuring a historical, never-before-seen composition by the artist. The presentation opens this coming Wednesday, September 23, 3:00 am PT / 12:00 pm CET at DavidKordanskyGallery.com and will remain on view through September 30, 2020. Sam Gilliam’s Harmony (1965) is an important early canvas by one of the key figures in postwar American painting. It both illuminates his roots in the Washington Color School and opens avenues for exploring the formative ideas and influences that characterized the beginnings of his career. Painted at a moment when American politics and culture were undergoing a series of radical shifts, Harmony provides a window into the creative energy and experimental ethos that have been present throughout every phase of Gilliam’s development as an artist. With its clear connection to the geometric vocabulary that predominated among painters in Washington, D.C. at the time, Harmony also contains a number of moves that telegraph other kinds of thinking and making. Some of these become most apparent when comparing them to analogous modes of formal investigation in other art forms. Chief among these is the improvisational openness of jazz, which Gilliam has often cited as an inspiration, and which was often in a state of dynamic transformation in the mid-1960s. As Gilliam has shown time and again throughout the decades, familiar genres provide unexpected potential for innovation when treated not as ends in and of themselves, but as points of departure. Harmony is notable for the precision and activating nature of its color relationships, a Gilliam hallmark no matter the scale, medium, or compositional style. Even at this early date—and even while employing an orderly, hard-edged visual syntax—his penchant for channeling the force and beauty of the natural world are on full display. This is all the more remarkable given that the Magna acrylic resin paints that he and the other Washington Color School painters were using at the time were very much the products of modern, postwar industry. While the free-flowing compositions that would come on the heels of Gilliam’s hard-edge period might seem at first glance to be more overtly “natural” in their rhythms and textures, the optical subtleties in Harmony put the emphasis on sight, the mechanics of the eye, and the relationship between the human mind and body and the environments they observe and inhabit. In 2022, Sam Gilliam (b. 1933, Tupelo, Mississippi; lives and works in Washington, D.C.) will be the subject of a career-spanning retrospective exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. In addition to a long-term solo show that opened last year at Dia:Beacon, New York, a solo survey exhibition at Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2018), and a traveling retrospective organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2005), he has also presented solo shows at the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (2011); the Speed Memorial Museum, Louisville, Kentucky (1996); the Whitney Museum of American Art, Philip Morris Branch, New York (1993); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (1982); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1971), among many other institutions. Recent group exhibitions include Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963–1983, which originated at the Tate Modern (2017), traveled to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas (2018), Brooklyn Museum (2018), The Broad, Los Angeles (2019), de Young Museum, San Francisco (2019), and Museum of Fine Arts Houston (2020); Viva Arte Viva, 57th Venice Biennale (2017); Not New Now, Marrakech Biennale 6, Morocco (2016); and Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties, Brooklyn Museum, New York (2014). Gilliam’s work is included in over fifty public collections, including those of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Tate Modern, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.