Sam Francis

"Sam Francis's paintings are a journey into a dream, a voyage into the landscapes of the soul where colours are lights on fire."

Samuel Lewis Francis (1923–1994) is an American artist, born the 25th of June1923 in San Mateo, California, USA. He died on 4th of November 1994 in Santa Monica. He developed a new aesthetics of colours and a new conception of the canvas. Alongside names such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, Sam Francis is an artist who has succeeded in demonstrating a total mastery of abstract expressionism's impassioned and spontaneous genre.

At the age of 20 he joined the air force and in 1944 he crashed in the middle of a desert with his airplane during an exercise. He was hospitalised during two years and that's when he started to paint. "My painting comes from my disease. I left the hospital by painting. My body suffered but since I was capable of painting I recovered."

Leaving the hospital, Sam Francis started to study art at Berkeley and in 1946 he got in contact with the abstract art as he attended a course of the artist Clyfford Still. He left for Paris in 1948-1949 where he met with american artists that we today call action painters. He was inspired by their different techniques like dripping and all-over.

It was in 1952 at the Galerie Nina Dausset in Paris that Sam Francis's had his first exhibition which was followed by two others at Galerie Rive Droite.

Ever since his accident Sam Francis tried to convey the feeling of infinity which he had caught a glimpse of in the desert. To him, the white canvas interfuses with heaven and he decides to paint nothing but the background, representing infinity. It's "the space inbetween the things" that interests him. Just like the spots all elements enable an interpretation as they have been eliminated, depth is what rests, "depth is all".

His work has been exhibited in numerous institutions and galleries all over the world. Today Sam Francis is represented in most museums of modern and contemporary art e.g. in New York, Los Angeles, Paris Zurich and at Tate Gallery in London. The Museum Idemitsu in Tokyo has the most important collection of his paintings. An exhibition of his "Years in Paris" was held at la Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in 1995 shortly after his passing.