“Painting is about the beauty of space and the power of containment.”
- Sam Francis

Sam Francis is one of the most significant abstract artists of the American postwar period. His painting is characterised by a distinctive interplay of colour, movement and open space, in which the physical presence of pigment becomes a central element of the work’s expression.

In the work presented here, intense fields of violet, blue, green, yellow, orange and red converge in a dense and dynamic composition. The relationship between colour and empty space is central to Francis’s art. The white paper does not function as a neutral background, but rather as an active space within the composition.

Francis’s working method combined spontaneity with a strong sense of composition. Paint could be poured, dripped, splashed and dragged across the support, giving rise to unpredictable encounters between pigments.