Sam Gilliam: STITCHED

March 13 – April 25, 2026
510 West 25th Street
New York

New York – In 1993, Sam Gilliam was accepted as the artist in residence at Ballinglen Arts Foundation in the rural north of
Ireland and went to ship his usual paints to the residency. When the paints were barred from shipment because they
contained highly flammable petroleum, Gilliam found himself in a dire circumstance that called for innovation. At his studio
in Washington D.C., Gilliam painted and stained a large group of monumental loose canvases, folded them up, and
shipped them to Ballinglen.

These canvases became the source material for a new body of work he would produce in Ireland—for a painting residency
during which he did no actual painting. Once on site, Gilliam hired a local seamstress and worked alongside her every day,
cutting and stitching the pre-painted canvases to construct brand new paintings from the found material of his own
creation. The results were dynamic three-dimensional wall works and hanging sculptures, vibrant compositions of
colliding and coalescing geometries and colors which defy easy categorization as painting or sculpture. Gilliam’s stitched
works are perhaps best understood as Constructivist objects, which reflect his tireless spirit of invention, much like the
circumstances of their own creation. Three decades later, many of these works were shown for the first time in Sam
Gilliam: Sewing Fields at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin in 2025.

On view at Pace at its 510 West 25th Street from March 13 to April 25, Sam Gilliam: STITCHED expands upon the IMMA
exhibition. The gallery’s presentation features many of the wall-mounted works that were the focus of IMMA’s exhibition,
as well as never-before-seen volumetric, balloon-like hanging sculptures from the same period. The exhibition marks the
United States debut for all included works, and the global debut for several others.

Often credited with freeing the canvas from its support, Gilliam broke down the distinctions between painting and
sculpture throughout his career. In many ways, these stitched works from the 1990s are the product of Gilliam’s lifelong
interest in Constructivism, and they bridge his canonical early-career Drape paintings with his late work, last shown at
Pace in 2023.

“I’d call myself a mirror,” the artist once said. “A mirror that reflects, borrows, and steals from different art movements,
reorienting them in order to squeeze out new life.”

Widely recognized as one of the boldest figures of postwar American painting, Gilliam emerged from Washington, D.C. in
the mid-1960s with works that elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of Color School painting. Drawing inspiration from
the improvisatory nature of jazz and the history of art itself, he nurtured a radical vision that extended the traditional
boundaries of art. Through his investigations of technique, gesture, materiality, color, and space, Gilliam continually
reinvented his practice to pursue a lifelong inquiry into the expressive, aesthetic, and philosophical powers of abstraction.

The catalogue accompanying IMMA’s recent exhibition as well as Phaidon’s 2024 monograph on the artist will both be
available on-site at the gallery during the run of the show and can also be purchased on Pace’s website.

Sam Gilliam (b. 1933, Tupelo, Mississippi; d. 2022, Washington, D.C.) was one of the great innovators in postwar
American painting. He emerged from the Washington, D.C. scene in the mid-1960s with works that elaborated upon and
disrupted the ethos of the Washington Color School. A series of formal breakthroughs would soon result in his canonical
Drape paintings, which expanded upon the tenets of Abstract Expressionism in entirely new ways. Suspending
stretcherless lengths of painted canvas from the walls or ceilings of exhibition spaces, Gilliam transformed his medium
and the context in which it was viewed. As an artist in the nation’s capital at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, this
was not merely an aesthetic proposition; it was a way of defining art’s role in a society undergoing dramatic change.
Gilliam pursued a pioneering course in which experimentation was the only constant. Inspired by the improvisatory ethos
of jazz, his lyrical abstractions took on an increasing variety of forms, moods, and materials.

In addition to a traveling retrospective organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in 2005, solo
exhibitions of Gilliam’s work have been held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1971); The Studio Museum in
Harlem, New York (1982); Whitney Museum of American Art, Philip Morris Branch, New York (1993); Speed Art Museum,
Louisville, Kentucky (1976, 1996, 2006); The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (1967, 2011); Kunstmuseum Basel
(2018); Dia Beacon, New York (2019–22), and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C. (2022), among many other institutions. His work is held in numerous public collections worldwide
including The Art Institute of Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum
of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Pennsylvania; and Tate, London, among many others.

Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential artists and estates of the 20th and 21st
centuries, founded by Arne Glimcher in 1960. Holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet,
Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko, Pace has a unique history that can be traced to its early support of
artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery
continues to nurture its longstanding relationships with its legacy artists and estates while also making an investment in
the careers of contemporary artists, including Torkwase Dyson, Loie Hollowell, Robert Nava, Adam Pendleton, and Marina
Perez Simão.

Under the current leadership of CEO Marc Glimcher and President Samanthe Rubell, Pace has established itself as a
collaborative force in the art world, partnering with other galleries and nonprofit organizations around the world in recent
years. The gallery advances its mission to support its artists and share their visionary work with audiences and collectors
around the world through a robust global program anchored by its exhibitions of both 20th century and contemporary art
and scholarly projects from its imprint Pace Publishing, which produces books introducing new voices to the art historical
canon. This artist-first ethos also extends to public installations, philanthropic events, performances, and other
interdisciplinary programming presented by Pace.

Today, Pace has nine locations worldwide, including two galleries in New York—its eight-story headquarters at 540 West
25th Street and an adjacent 8,000-square-foot exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street. The gallery’s history in the New
York art world dates to 1963, when it opened its first space in the city on East 57th Street. A champion of Light and Space
artists, Pace has also been active in California for some 60 years, opening its West Coast flagship in Los Angeles in
2022. It maintains European footholds in London, Geneva, and Berlin, where it established an office in 2023 and a gallery
space in 2025. Pace was one of the first international galleries to have a major presence in Asia, where it has been active
since 2008, the year it first opened in Beijing’s vibrant 798 Art District. It now operates a gallery in Seoul and opened its
first gallery in Japan in Tokyo’s Azabudai Hills development in 2024.