Sam Gillan
Sam Gillan
Watercolour, 4 1969
Watercolor, and aluminum powder on fiberglass paper 23 3/4 x 18 1/8" (60.3 x 45.9 cm)
Blurring the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and installation, Sam Gilliam wrestles with the physicality of the art object and its relationship to the viewer.
he moved to Washington, DC, during the formation of Color Field painting, which emphasized the use of flat planes of color and novel paint application techniques.
Gilliam soon experimented with color, form, and technique, pouring pigments and folding canvases while still wet.
remove his canvases from their stretchers entirely, and, inspired by laundry on clotheslines, hang them from the ceiling or walls.
Gilliam transformed painting into something sculptural and three-dimensional, disrupting traditional modes of presentation and viewing.
He also incorporated metal forms, alternative materials like yarn and glitter, varied applications of paint, and quilt-inspired patterning into his practice.
“the expressive act of making a mark and hanging it in space is always political. My work is as political as it is formal.”
Sam Gilliam, Green April, 1969,
acrylic on canvas, 98 x 271 x 3 7/8 inches (248.9 x 688.3 x 9.8 cm), Collection of Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland, Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, photography by Lee Thompson.
his lyrical abstractions took on an increasing variety of forms, moods, and materials.
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Marbling
The quality of a surface that has streaks of color, like marble
The patterns are formed by first floating the colors on the surface of a liquid, and then laying the paper or fabric onto the colors to absorb them.
looking through ancient volumes full of arcane recipes for mixing such exotic ingredients as Irish moss seaweed, spirits of green soap, and distilled bile from the gall bladder of an ox.
They were used for decorative purposes, and also as a background for official documents and signatures, to prevent erasure and forgery.
The traditional marbling inks were just not durable enough to stand up to washing. Now, though, fine marbling can be done just as easily on cloth as on paper with these new paints, and modern colors are much more vivid and brilliant and long-lasting than ever in the past.
Stone Marble: Gives the effect of real marble. Stone marbles are the simplest patterns, but they often take longer to make than the more complex combed patterns, because so many thousands of tiny droplets of color must be applied.
Marble
Marble is metamorphosed limestone, quartzite is metamorphosed sandstone, and gneiss, another common metamorphic rock, sometimes begins as granite.
Metamorphic rocks are sedimentary or igneous rocks that have been transformed by pressure, heat, or the intrusion of fluids. The heat may come from nearby magma or hot water intruding via hot springs. It can also come from subduction, when tectonic forces draw rocks deep beneath the Earth's surface.
Using gestural brushstrokes or stains across the medium, Benvenuto focuses on line and detail to build a narration of the life around her. She draws back to significant events, the people she’s met, or the changing landscape. Fundamentally, the artist surprises herself every day, shocking herself with what’s not familiar. From the changing seasons to the sweeping ocean — she is ever surrounded by inspiration, in awe of its beauty.
Benvenuto found her calling within abstract works, focusing on what cannot be represented. In her artworks, the artist wants to explore and create new imagery to navigate the current world. Working from the mind, using memories to shape her composition, Benvenuto connects with her audience through visual representation; a soft curve becoming a wave, or gestural mark-making turning into long grass dancing in the wind.
Her works narrate an exploration of textile, material and technique, probing the viewer to move closer to the works, at times leaving the linen raw inviting an organic aesthetic. Geometric shapes, sharp lines, or paint gestures activate the viewer’s eye in an array of multi-colour.
What would you like people to notice in your artwork?
Ultimately, I wish for my artwork to spark conversations and introspection. Whether it's the boldness of colors, the rhythm of lines, or the unexpected combinations in my sculptures, I hope my creations leave a lasting impression that lingers in the hearts and minds of those who encounter them. By capturing attention and evoking emotions, I aim to create a bridge between my inner artistic world and the diverse experiences of my audience. The interplay of vibrant colors and intricate forms is meant to prompt viewers to explore their own interpretations and connect with the stories I'm weaving through each piece. I hope that as people engage with my art, they find moments of reflection.
Color field Painting
The term colour field painting is applied to the work of abstract painters working in the 1950s and 1960s characterised by large areas of a more or less flat single colour.
From around 1960 a more purely abstract form of colour field painting emerged in the work of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Alma Thomas, Sam Gilliam and others. It differed from abstract expressionism in that these artists eliminated both the emotional, mythic or religious content of the earlier movement, and the highly personal and painterly or gesturalapplication associated with it. In 1964 an exhibition of thirty-one artists associated with this development was organised by the critic Clement Greenberg at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He titled it Post-Painterly Abstraction, a term often also used to describe the work of the 1960 generation and their successors.
Sediment
Rock salt, also known as halite, forms as oceans evaporate. Oceans are made of salt water. When the water enters the atmosphere as vapor, it leaves the salt behind. The Bonneville Salt Flats, in the U.S. state of Utah, are flat desert areas covered by a layer of rock salt sediment. Lake Bonneville, the ancient seathat once covered the area, has long since evaporated.
SALT OF THE BAY
“I’m fascinated and drawn to these shapes and colors at sunset,” says Your Shot member Jassen T., who captured this aerial image of a salt marsh in northern California’s San Francisco Bay. “It’s a very unique and photogenic area.”
Wangechi Mutu
“I create as a way of reinvigorating myself by replacing and reworking images and ideas that never fully represented me and the women and the people I was born from and who made me,” Wangechi Mutu has said.1 Born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1972, the artist relocated to the US in the mid-1990s to study fine art. Her experience of migration and her diasporic identity have infused the artist’s creations with an expansive philosophy of belonging: “If a plant has just one root that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to stand straight and strong. The idea of having many roots, of having your feet really grounded in different places, is extremely empowering for me.”
Mutu is committed to reshaping the narratives of womanhood; by doing so, she challenges Western culture’s racist and misogynistic tenets
In her collages, sculptures, videos, and performances the figure of the woman is depicted with the complexity and profundity of a timeless archetype
As the artist explained the origin of her collage-making practice,
“I took these idealized stereotyped images of women and Eden-like ‘tropical’ images of Africa to create other images, tension-charged, potent, because they were full of my own emotional upset at the original ones…I was taking apart the images of a world that refused to acknowledge me.”
In Yo Mama (2006), the heroine—modeled after Funmilayo Anikulapo-Kuti, the Nigerian feminist and mother of the legendary Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti—embodies the role of Eve, the biblical first woman. She stands atop a beheaded snake, piercing its severed head with the stiletto heel of her boot. The serpent’s coiling body unravels placidly through the pink outer space, holding the two panels of the collage together as its tail wraps around a distant planet. Mutu’s cosmic composition utilizes the potent symbol of the snake in all its richness: the cunning creature associated with Eve’s damnation morphs into a mythical, celestial being whose dead body bridges two planets, while its wounded phallic form evokes oppressive masculinity. In Mutu’s retelling of this foundational tale, Eve defeats the snake and emerges victorious, taking control of her own story.
In Mutu’s practice, mixing materials through collage, bricolage, and montage is not a mere formal choice but a guiding principle of resilience and regeneration.
James Turrell
influenced by the notion of pure feeling in pictorial art
constructing light and painting with light
building on the sensorial experience of space, color, and perception.
Turrell produced some of his first light sculptures, using gases to create flat flames that burned in even colors.
James Turrell, From Aten Reign, 2016,
Ukiyo-e Japanese style woodcut with relief printing, 26" × 18-1/2" (66 cm × 47 cm), Edition of 30 + 6 APs © James Turrell
work with high-intensity projectors as a light source, producing the first of his Projection Pieces, Afrum-Proto.
These studies of perceptual anomalies further ignited his interest in the celestial realm, and he began to incorporate aviation into his practice by creating sky drawings with the artist Sam Francis.
Turrell’s practice has equally materialized in small-scale works, including architectural models, holograms, and works on paper.
A leading figure of the Light and Space movement, James Turrell creates colored light installations and holographs that produce awe-inspiring optical illusions: Turrell’s pieces can look like cubes, flat planes, pyramids, or tunnels, when they’re simply composed of light. The artist studied at the University of California, Irvine, before attending the art and technology program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. There, he worked alongside fellow light artist Robert Irwin and honed his now-signature process and aesthetic. Turrell’s work has been shown in institutions around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Museo Jumex, among others. Since the 1970s, Turrell has been working on a celestial light observatory at the Roden Crater in Arizona.
Roden Crater Site Plan along the Summer Solstice Axis, 2024
Gold leaf and glass 18 × 14 1/5 × 5 in | 45.7 × 36.1 × 12.7 cm Edition 3/30 Part of a limited edition set
Roden Crater Site Plan, 2020
Inkjet Blueprint 44 1/10 × 54 1/10 in | 112 × 137.3 cm Edition 9/100 Part of a limited edition set
Yus-Asaph, Rectangular Glass, 2021
LED light, etched glass and shallow space 46 × 62 in | 116.8 × 157.5 cmUnique work
Exhibition 2
The gallery has a number of exhibitions, but I mainly focused on the Amie Siegel exhibition and the exhibition from Christopher Mahon.
By Christopher Mahon.
VISUAL is pleased to present Sincere, or what you will, a solo exhibition by Irish artist Christopher Mahon.
Mahon works across a range of media including sculpture, painting, photography, installation and performance, and his practice is notable for the variety of disciplines and materials used. He has worked with actors and dancers to create site-responsive environments that combine the mundane and theatrical, and often incorporates found objects in the finished piece.
For several years Mahon has maintained a studio in Cairo, Egypt, basing much of his sculptural production on the techniques and capabilities of the small industrial workshops – the foundries, metal-, stone- and wood-working studios – that dot the city’s backstreets.
Mahon’s sculptures occupy the unstable space between lyricism and materiality, the concrete and ineffable. His materials reference the form and patina of everyday objects and their archaeological forebears. Figurative and decorative elements – carved stone arms, cast brass urns, found textiles – speak to both the historical context and daily domesticity. His material language embraces the mechanical detritus of the modern metropolis. Once functional objects now beyond repair, furniture so broken that no one will give it houseroom. The twisted fragments, nuts, bolts, cogs, pipes, of an obsolete infrastructure are repurposed or recreated so they can play their part as elements in a newly finished work.
Take BAI GAMAYKA, a key work in Sincere, or what you will. The seemingly meaningless set of brass sans-serif letters mounted on the wall reproduces the sign that hangs above one of Cairo’s few remaining downtown bars. The cursive flourish of the r fell off long ago and there is no soft g in colloquial Egyptian pronunciation. Bar Jamaica/BAI GAMAYKA hangs opposite The Sky so Blue, a scrawled handwritten phrase that has been recreated in outsized aluminium letters that hang floating in space; half-baked poetry facing off against a hard-bitten bar.
The exhibition’s title Sincere, or what you will foregrounds the artist’s interest in the ambiguous, the porous, the making things whole anew, if only temporarily. While it is now widely accepted that sincere derives from the Latin sincerus meaning clean, pure, sound, a common folk etymology has it that sincere is derived from the Latin sine, without, and cera, wax. The phrase was used to describe a perfect marble sculpture with no cracks needing to be filled with wax to trick unwary buyers. “or what you will” is drawn from the full title of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, a romantic comedy replete with love triangles and protagonists in disguise. The play was written to be performed on the twelfth night of Christmas or the feast of the Ephiphany, a holiday that shifts around the calendar depending on the Eastern or Western Christan tradition, and which now marks the boundary between an extended holiday period and the imminent return to work.
This exhibition, too, exists on the boundary between places and times both real and reimagined, where memories and materials can appear and dissolve and reappear anew.
Sincere, or what you will is co-curated by Benjamin Stafford (VISUAL) and Rachael Gilbourne (IMMA, RGKSKSRG). A text by Gilbourne, An Ode to Spring, from the End of Winter, to the Start of Summer, accompanies the exhibition and is available here and at the gallery.
Christopher Mahon is an Irish artist and the work for VISUAL was produced in his studio in Cairo. He attended the École Jacques Lecoq Movement Research Laboratory, Paris, holds an MA in Art and Research Collaboration from IADT and was a resident at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam 2018–2019. Mahon has exhibited in Ireland and internationally. Projects include Paris Art Book Fair, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2024), Aswan International Sculpture Symposium (2021), Rijksakademie Open Studios, Amsterdam (2019), Le Menagerie de Verre, Paris (2019), Townhouse Gallery, Cairo (2019), RGKSKSRG Cribs, Dublin (2019), Double Negative, ARKO Art Centre, Seoul (2018) and Active Archive, Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2018). Mahon’s work is held in private and public collections in Ireland, Europe and North America.
By Amie Siegel
VISUAL is pleased to present Asterisms, a solo exhibition by Amie Siegel. Siegel is an American artist who lives in Brooklyn, New York, and works across film, video, photography, sculpture, painting and installation.
Asterisms is both a moving-image work and a sculptural installation, its uniquely star-shaped wall of overlapping images built to a scale the artist proposed in response to the architecture of VISUAL’s Main Gallery. An asterism is a loose collection of stars that form a pattern, similar to but smaller than a constellation. This notion of disparate elements combining to form a complete image is key to both Asterisms itself, and to Siegel’s practice in general, in which deep research produces artworks that address cultural, political and social questions.
The setting and context of Asterisms is the United Arab Emirates, a place that has modernized at a rapid pace, built on wealth originally derived from ownership of natural resources. Throughout Siegel’s cinematic work the viewer encounters images of factories, labour, commerce, leisure, technology, humans, and animals. These elements are interwoven in the artist’s careful montage and in the various cinematically-scaled geometries that build and layer over time, both in their accumulation of meaning but also as the images dynamically overlap and connect on the star-shaped wall. Horses play a role in the work, and are seen stabled in luxurious accommodation, in sharp contrast with the conditions in which migrant labourers live and work. Horse’s flanks echo the shape of sand dunes and seem to merge with the landscape. The material of that same desert landscape – sand – is everywhere; kicked up into dust by hooves, encroaching on buildings, filling the doorways and windows and almost totally burying houses. Sand is dumped onto artificial islands, to arrest their rapid erosion back into the sea.
These artificial islands comprise a development designed to mimic a map of the world when viewed from above. Despite having once been a flagship project of the Emirate of Dubai, they are no longer promoted by the government. They hide in plain sight, simultaneously visible and invisible. In one of the later shots in Asterisms, the camera zooms out from a party on one of the islands, where a crowd drinks and dances by a swimming pool. As the partygoers recede into the distance, the lights of the sole inhabited island in a sea of dark ones makes them appear as distant and alone as a star hanging in a night sky.
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On show in VISUAL’s Digital Gallery is Siegel’s RM, a series of photographs of radioactive minerals. This group of works allude to Asterisms both in their constellation-like display, individually illuminated in a darkened space, and their own almost astral representations, glowing gently in dark matter. Many of the minerals Siegel photographed are pseudomorphs, or “false forms”, an occurrence where one mineral’s substance is entirely replaced by another while retaining its outward physical appearance. In each of these differently scaled works, the inherent danger of the radioactive material contrasts with their jewel-like colours and forms, their true nature disguised.
Alongside these works Siegel presents Listening to the Universe (2014), a work-on-paper and act of montage derived from the artist's collection of science and space museum postcards, presenting the vacuum of sound that is outer space, and our continual efforts to listen, or know, our sphere and beyond.
Asterisms is a commission of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil and VIA Art Fund. Additional support by KTLO, Los Angeles.
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Amie Siegel (b. 1974, Chicago, IL) is a visual artist working variously with film, video, photography, sound, performance and installation. She is known for her layered, meticulously constructed works that trace and perform the undercurrents of systems of value, cultural ownership and image-making.
Recent solo exhibitions include Panorama, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2023); Bloodlines, Scottish National Museum Gallery of Modern Art (2022); The Silence, ArkDes, Stockholm (2022); Medium Cool, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2019); In Focus: Amie Siegel – Provenance, Tate St. Ives (2018); Winter, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2017); Strata, South London Gallery (2017); Double Negative, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2016); Ricochet, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2016) and Imitation of Life, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (2016). She has participated in the 34th São Paulo Bienal; 12th Gwangju Biennial; Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh; Glasgow International, Scotland; 5th Auckland Triennial, New Zealand; and the Whitney Biennial, among numerous other group exhibitions.
Siegel’s work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Art Institute of Chicago; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand; MAK-Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum, New York and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Her films have screened at the Cannes, Berlin, Toronto, Rotterdam and New York film festivals. She has been a fellow of the DAAD Berliner-Künstlerprogramm and Guggenheim Foundation, a Fulton Fellow at The Film Study Center at Harvard University and a Smithsonian Artist Fellow. Siegel has received numerous grants and awards including from the Sundance Institute, Princess Grace Foundation, ICA Boston (Foster Prize), Creative Capital, Anonymous Was a Woman and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York. In 2023 she was an Artist-in-Residence at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT.
Alice Baber (American, 1928-1982), The Light Inside the Mountain, 1978. Oil on canvas, 32 7/8 x 55 in.
