
Isabel Norsten
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Sold for US$102,100 inc. premium
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Acquired directly from the artist by the current owner.
My Drape paintings are never hung the same way twice. The composition is always present, but one must let things go, be open to improvisation, spontaneity, what's happening in a space while one works.
-Sam Gilliam
quoted in "Sam Gilliam: a life beyond the frame", The Art Newspaper, June 2018
A foundational figure in the redefinition of abstract painting in Post-War America, Sam Gilliam's innovations with unstretched canvas radically expanded the formal and spatial potential of the medium. Needing Starlight II belongs to the artist's celebrated Drape series, a body of work initiated in the late 1960s that marked a profound departure from conventional painterly practice. In these works, Gilliam rejected the stretcher in favor of suspended, free-hanging canvases that function as both painting and sculptural form. Color is applied through soaking and staining, then manipulated via folding and twisting processes that generate richly layered surfaces and chromatic complexity.
The present work was created during a period of renewed critical attention to Gilliam's practice. In the early 2000s, Gilliam returned to the Drape form with conceptual and material reinvention, integrating new techniques and emphasizing the role of spatial contingency. Needing Starlight II exemplifies this late-career engagement, in which the installation becomes an act of improvisation. The work's composition is inherently variable, adapting to the architectural and atmospheric conditions of each site; a gesture that reaffirms Gilliam's belief in painting as a responsive, open-ended medium.
The significance of this period was underscored by Sam Gilliam: A Retrospective, curated by Jonathan P. Binstock and organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art (2005–06). The exhibition, which traveled to the Speed Art Museum, the Telfair Museum, and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, traced over four decades of Gilliam's boundary-pushing practice-from early geometric abstraction to the monumental drapes and mixed-media works that redefined the very terms of painting in space.