Sam Francis

A major figure of postwar American abstraction, Sam Francis occupies a singular place in art history: that of a painter whose work, open to the world, moves between California, Paris, Tokyo, and Basel while developing a profoundly interior language.
His painting is an adventure: a practice in which color becomes breath, splash, expansion, or silence, and where light circulates as a force of its own.

Born in San Mateo, California, Francis discovered painting during a long convalescence: a foundational moment that instilled in his work an almost organic relationship to the act of painting. Early on, his canvases moved away from the gestural density of Abstract Expressionism to explore a more aerial space: large white reserves, chromatic bursts, floating structures. This “active void” would become his signature.

In the mid-1950s, he settled in Paris, where his sensitivity to the more diffuse, tempered European light nourished a period of great chromatic subtlety. He developed a vocabulary of vibrant stains and color networks, often associated with a form of “spatial lyricism.” In the decades that followed, Francis multiplied technical approaches and scales: immense multi-panel works, works on paper, murals, and explorations in printmaking and lithography.

Today, his work is held in major international institutions, from the MoMA (New York) to the Centre Pompidou (Paris), as well as the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston) and the Kunstmuseum Basel.