Untitled (SF77-069), 1977

Name: Untitled (SF77-069), 1977
Brand: Sam Francis
Availability: InStock

Sam Francis

Medium: acrylic on paper

Signature: signed 'Sam Francis' on verso

Framed size: 16.25 x 18"

Price on Request

SIZE 7 x 10 7 x 10

15513581

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"Untitled (SF77-069)" is an acrylic on paper painting created by Sam Francis in 1977. The artwork is signed 'Sam Francis' on verso. The artwork ships framed in a custom closed-corner gold leaf frame and has a framed size of 16.25 x 18".

Sam Francis was among the most respected colorists of the postwar era, and "Untitled (SF77-069), 1977," offers compelling evidence of his achievement. By the late 1970s, Francis had entered the mature phase of his celebrated Matrix paintings, a body of work in which structure and spontaneity converge with striking force. Here, color is not merely applied; it is orchestrated, released, and contained within a disciplined armature that intensifies its power.

The Matrix paintings mark a pivotal moment in Francis’s evolution. After the open expanses of his Edge paintings and the explosive gestural fields of earlier decades, he adopted a gridded cross-weave that suggests both architectural rigor and meditative repetition. Yet the grid is never static. In Francis’s hands, it becomes a living scaffold: a rhythmic system that allows color to assert its psychic and emotional charge with heightened clarity. The matrix is not confinement, but catalyst.

In "Untitled (SF77-069)," the geometry of a square mandala seems to underlie the composition. The format evokes balance and centeredness, while the center remains open, animated, and alive. Spurts of pigment invade the white field: splatters, blotches, and smears pulse across the surface with improvisational urgency. The painting’s central drama lies in this tension between order and eruption.

Color generates the work’s energy and movement. Crimsons interlace with bright blues, oranges, greens, and yellows, creating passages of deepened tonality. What first appears black is in fact the result of layered acrylics, pigments merging into dense, near-opaque hues that heighten the surrounding luminosity. In places, yellow turns earthen as it meets neighboring tones, revealing the physicality of paint and the alchemical nature of Francis’s process.

Despite the density of activity, the white center and corners remain luminous anchors. For Francis, white is neither absence nor pause, but an active force: a breathing interval that heightens saturation and draws the eye inward. The result is both contemplative and dynamic, a visual oscillation between stillness and release.

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Details

Medium: acrylic on paper
Year: 1977

Image size: 7 x 10"
Framed size: 16.25 x 18"

Signature: signed 'Sam Francis' on verso

Reference:

SF77-069

About the Work

About the Artist

Sam Francis (1923 – 1994), internationally celebrated for his radiant use of color and light, stands as one of the great figures of postwar abstraction. His bold canvases, rooted in Abstract Expressionism yet enriched by global influences from Paris to Tokyo, speak directly to today’s collectors seeking works that transcend boundaries of place and time. Francis’s paintings and works on paper are represented in the world’s leading museums, including MoMA (New York), Tate (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), LACMA (Los Angeles), and SFMOMA. His market remains exceptionally strong, underscored by recent record-breaking sales and renewed curatorial attention, such as LACMA’s 2023 exhibition Sam Francis and Japan: Emptiness Overflowing. With their luminous expanses of white and bursts of vivid blues, reds, and golds, Francis’s works feel startlingly contemporary, anchoring him as a cornerstone of 20th-century art whose vision remains vital in the 21st-century market.

Untitled (SF77-069), 1977

$98,500.00

7 x 10

SELECTED WORK

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