Coffee Thyme II,

1980

<p>In the 1980s, Gilliam stated, "Figurative art doesn’t represent blackness any more than a non-narrative media-oriented kind <br>of painting, like what I do." Consistently committed to abstraction since the 1960s, the artist radicalized painting by dispensing with stretchers and frames, draping, hanging, knotting, and folding his stained and saturated canvases into colorful three-dimensional rhythms. This print relates to Gilliam’s <em>Black Paintings</em> series of the late 1970s, in which he enhanced the rugged asphalt-like surface by dragging a shag-rug rake across gel-thickened acrylic paint, producing encrusted and poetically evocative expanses of shifting patterns.</p>