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SAM FRANCIS     USA   1923 - 1994

Sam Francis was born in San Mateo in California, USA in 1923. After starting to paint at the age of 20, he found himself consumed by the power of art. He spent much of the 1950s in Paris, from where he made frequent excursions to European cities and journeys to South America and Asia. moving from place to place, primarily the USA & Japan, up until his death in 1994. Sam Francis’s paintings are a journey into a dream, a voyage into the landscapes of the soul where colours are lights on fire. Alongside Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, Francis was an artist who demonstrated a total mastery of abstract expressionism’s impassioned and spontaneous genre. The explosions of colour – red, blue, green and yellow – the streaks, strokes and bold lines of his pictures are the physical synthesis of the deepest crevices of the soul. His colours create rhythmical motifs that characterise the musicality of his paintings. Francis' work was Influenced by C.G. Jung, the father of psychoanalysis and demonstrates a struggle between melancholy and merrymaking. He spent a large portion of his life exploring the premise that dreams, instincts and intuition provide the keys which unlock the mysteries and meaning of our inner lives. Today he is widely represented in major museums of modern and contemporary art.

 

 

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