Sandra Blow 1925-2006
Composition, 1960
oil on board
47 x 53 ins
signed and dated verso 'S Blow 1960'

Provenance
Gimpel Fils, London
Private Collection

Exhibited
Gimpel Fils,London, Sandra Blow 1960

Literature
Gimpel Fils,London , Sandra Blow April 1960 , no. 12



Still only in her early twenties, Blow went, in 1946, to continue her studies in Italy. There she formed a close friendship and travelled widely with the artist Alberto Burri, whose expressive abstract paintings incorporating a wide variety of matter -charred sacking, earth, concrete, grit - into the surface, had made him a leading figure in the European avant-garde of the immediate post-war period. He had a powerful influence on the direction her work was to take and when she returned to England in 1950 her bold abstract paintings, themselves incorporating, or substituting for paint, materials such as cement, ash and earth, placed her very much in the Art Brut tradition of Tapies, Dubuffet and others. It also won her immediate public and critical recognition with purchases by MOMA in New York, and the Tate and inclusion in the Venice Biennale in the 1950s. This powerful painting, dating from 1960, came at a time when she had been living for a year or so at Zennor, near St.Ives. Roger Hilton had proved a keen and helpful critic of her work during this period and this has something of his explosive character in it as well as of the space, light and air of the landscape itself; many of her paintings were made using the outside of the barn she was painting in as her easel.