Produced on the occasion of the exhibition The Music of Color, Sam Gilliam, 1967–1973, 9 June–30 September, 2018, Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel. Texts by Sam Gilliam, Jonathan P. Binstock, Lynette Yiadiom Boakye, Larne Abse Gogarty, Josef Helfenstein, Rashid Johnson and Rafael Squirru.

Sam Gilliam emerged from the Washington, D.C. scene in the mid 1960s with works that elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of Color School painting. 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 by suspending stretcherless lengths of painted canvas from the walls or ceilings of exhibition spaces. For an African-American 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.

Abstract painter Giorgio Griffa, closely linked to the Arte Povera movement, first became known in the 1960s as part of an Italian generation of artists who sought to radically redefine painting.

Believing in the ‘intelligence of painting’, Griffa allows the essential elements of his process, such as the type or width of the brush, the colour or dilution of the paint and the nature of the canvas, whether linen, cotton, hemp or jute, to influence and form the work. Griffa’s approach is performative and time-based—often working horizontally on the floor, his rhythmic, formal gestures soak into the unprimed and unstretched material.

Produced on the occasion of Konrad Klapheck’s 1974 exhibition at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Klapheck, who was just 10 when World War II ended, saw in the destroyed cities and ruined buildings all around him a certain beauty or spectacle. After becoming a student at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, Klapheck turned to a different kind of subject matter, creating the first of his many “machine pictures”: the 1955 painting Typewriter. He went on to expand his repertoire to include sewing machines, faucets, telephones, irons, and even a hay-turning machine

Produced on the occasion of Raoul de Keyser’s 1991 exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern. With texts from Ulrich Loock, Dirk de Vos and Paul Robbrecht.

Raoul De Keyser was a Belgian painter who from 1964 onwards built a highly personal body of work that was exceptionally difficult to categorize; he successfully reconciled a number of apparent contradictions such as figuration versus abstraction and the physicality of paint versus the ephemerality of the image.