Elephanta,

1970

Gilliam emerged as an innovative figure of the Washington Color School, a group that developed in the 1950s in Washington, DC, known for their technique of pouring thinned paint directly onto unprimed canvas to emphasize abstraction, flatness, and the expressive power of color. With Elephanta, Gilliam—an important Black artist at a time when artists of color were less represented in galleries and museums than today—took this method a step further by folding and manipulating the canvas to create a complex composition involving layers of wet paint. He often dispensed with the stretcher, the traditional support for canvases, electing instead to drape and loosely hang his canvases. For Elephanta, however, he treated the stretcher as a sculptural relief complete with beveled edges. The canvas envelops the stretcher, exposing its shifting planes and forming a cinematic screen onto which carefully choreographed layers and patterns of color and shimmering luminosity are projected.