“I prefer to think of colours in relation to each other, rather than just one colour at a time. So, even very small amounts of colour related to large amounts of another have a very curious and mysterious relationship set up the minute you start using colour; I'm working with that all the time and I think about it and dream about it and read about it and I've studied it all my life.”
Sam Francis

Colour was entirely central to Sam Francis’ practice. Following his early studies in the sciences and serving in the armed forces in World War II, Francis began to paint in earnest in 1945. He quickly became influenced by the major figures of American Abstract Expressionism such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. However, Francis spent much of his career in Paris, Japan and Germany, which distinguished his work stylistically from his American peers and gained him an international appeal and following.

‘Untitled’ is a fine example of Francis’ exuberant work from the 1980s. Here, he mixes blocks of pure colour with explosive splatters of paint balancing the two against the voids of untouched paper. The use of emptiness and white space was a crucial part of Francis’ work and show the influence of the Japanese calligraphy and haboku (traditional flung-ink painting) he studied while at his Tokyo studio. During the early 1980s, when Francis created ‘Untitled’, his work became increasingly characterised by a more concerted use of structure, which grounded the mind and body within the foundations of a formal grid. The use of this formation can be seen in the rectangle that frames ‘Untitled’, with the hot pink contrasting against the depth of the rich blue encased in the centre.

Francis’ work can be found in major international collections such as Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA, New York; Kunstmuseum, Basel; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Tate, London; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.