Apr 07, 2016 - Sale 2409

Sale 2409 - Lot 84

Price Realized: $ 93,750
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 50,000 - $ 75,000
SAM GILLIAM (1933 - )
Rondo IX.

Acrylic and canvas collage on cotton canvas, 1983. 1117x1524 mm; 44x60 inches, with beveled edges. Signed, titled and dated in acrylic, center verso.

Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection.

Exhibited: Modern Painters at the Corcoran: Sam Gilliam, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, March 24 - May 22, 1983.

This large painting is an excellent example of Sam Gilliam's Rondo series, a breakthough new series of paintings in the early 1980s. Thirteen panels from this series were hung together in the rotunda of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in his 1983 solo exhibiton Modern Painters at the Corcoran: Sam Gilliam. This new body of work was a marked departure from the stained canvases of the 1970s; Sam Gilliam now combined techniques of troweling thick skeins of acrylic paint with large collaged and stitched canvases. This is the first painting from this important series by Sam Gilliam to come to auction.