The late 1940 and 50s was a critical period in the development of abstraction in Britain, as a generation of artists embraced and wrestled with its implications, shaking a pervading conservatism in post-War British culture and paving the way for the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. They looked to ‘Tachisme’ in Europe and the Abstract Expressionists in the U.S - Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline and others. Some of the movements chief proponents in Britain included Victor Pasmore, Alan, Davie, Roger Hilton, William Scott and Patrick Heron. Two female pioneers in this male-dominated world were Gillian Ayres and Sandra Blow.

Born in London in 1925, Blow left school at 15 and in 1940 entered St Martin’s School of Art. Shortly after the Second World War she studied at the Royal Academy Schools but her most influential experience came on a trip to Italy in 1947. There she formed enlightening international contacts, notably Nicolas Carone – an Italian American from New Jersey who bridged the gap between the US and Europe. He was part of a movement whose impact was yet to be truly felt in Britain: Abstract Expressionism. It was Carone who encouraged Blow to enrol at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome where she was to meet Alberto Burri – they struck up a relationship and his experiments with employing various heavy materials in his abstractions impacted Blow’s own work. They moved to Paris in 1949 where they encountered ‘Art informel’ or subsequently ‘tachisme’ – defined by a free, abstract idiom in contract to the tight geometrical abstraction of Malevich or Mondrian before. Blow was thus exposed to key avant-garde developments in the U.S and Europe before returning to London in the 1950.

Through the decade, Abstract Expressionism gained increasing notoriety, notably when it was thrust into the limelight in 1956 with Tate’s exhibition Modern Art in the United States: A Selection from the Collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. As Patrick Heron commented in the March edition of Arts magazine that year, ‘at last we can see for ourselves what it is like to stand in a very large room hung with very large canvases by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline and others.’

Blow was central to the British guard of abstract painters in the 1950s, and indeed one of the movements most informed through her international contacts. She became represented by Gimpel Fils gallery in London, who were instrumental in promoting key avant-garde figures, including Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Peter Lanyon. This connection with the St Ives post-War abstract artists anticipated her own move to the town in 1957 to live and work for a year, and which became a lifelong association.

Through Gimple Fils she held successful exhibitions in London and New York and in 1957 was included in the first John Moores biannual exhibition in Liverpool, and featured in the Young Artists Section at the Venice Biennale the following year. She won the International Guggenheim Award in 1960 and won second prize at the third John Moores exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery in 1961. By the 1960s, Blow’s work had evolved from the heavier and more physical aspects of her 1950s collages, which utilised coarse netting and rough plaster. Rather, the influence of the American Abstract Expressionists is felt in more expansive and gestural works - emphatic in the present example. The preoccupation with space, matter, movement and balance is paramount, and the expressive curves and flashes of red display a vitality and sense of surprise that is a defining characteristic of Blow’s work.

The lighter mood chimed with the more optimistic climate of the 1960s, and which Blow would build on further through the decade, notably with large, brightly-coloured collages that balance between the constructed and freely painted. During the 60s Blow taught at the Royal College of Art, whose auspicious students included R.B. Kitaj, David Hockney and Patrick Caulfield.

Blow’s work is held public collections including the Tate, British Council, Royal Academy, Victorian & Albert Museum, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven and MOMA, New York. In 1994 the Royal Academy held a major retrospective, while the Tate staged an exhibition in 2005 to mark her eightieth birthday. More recently, she was included within the Whitechapel Gallery’s 2023 exhibition, Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940–1970, giving prominence again to the pioneering women painters like Blow who were critical voices in international Abstraction.