Untitled (SFP94-8), 1994

Name: Untitled (SFP94-8), 1994
Brand: Sam Francis
Availability: InStock

Sam Francis

Medium: acrylic on canvas laid on board

Signature: estate stamp on verso

Framed size: 16.5 x 20"

Price on Request

15513581

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"Untitled (SFP94-8)" is an acrylic on canvas laid on board created by Sam Francis in 1994. The artwork is estate stamped on verso. The artwork ships framed in a contemporary white frame and has a framed size of 16.5 x 20".

In 1994, the final year of his life, Sam Francis created a remarkable body of work marked by intensity, urgency, and radiant color. "Untitled (SFP94-8)" emerges from this profound late period as a luminous and deeply personal statement. Like others in the series, it serves as both testament and legacy: to the vitality of an artist who, despite immense physical adversity, created with a force that transcended the frailty of his body and revealed the full power of his inner world.

Saturated blues, fluorescent magentas and vibrant greens hover and flare against the canvas, their intensity heightened by areas of bright white open space. The chromatic relationships feel less confrontational than atmospheric — as if the colors are suspended in motion, drifting, expanding, and subtly interpenetrating. Organic forms echo loosely gridded structures, but the geometry never fully settles; it flickers between order and dissolution.

The splatters and bleeding edges suggest immediacy, yet they carry the assurance of a lifetime’s mastery. Francis’s handling of acrylic here is supple and deliberate. Pigment pools and thins; transparency meets saturation in delicate equilibrium. As William C. Agee observed of Francis’s work, color possesses “expressive and psychic power” — and in "Untitled (SFP94-8)," that power feels inward, meditative, almost cosmic.

The late paintings move abstraction into metaphysical territory, and this canvas feels particularly untethered. The absence of a fixed center invites contemplation rather than confrontation. Instead of anchoring the viewer, the composition opens outward, evoking a sense of boundlessness. It reads as a distilled reflection — a painting less about structure than about sensation, perception, and interior space.

Francis’s intimacy with his medium remained unwavering to the end. His sensitivity to opacity, layering, and surface tension is evident in every passage of paint. "Untitled (SFP94-8)" is not simply a late work; it is a summation. It speaks quietly yet powerfully of endurance, transformation, and the inexhaustible emotional language of color.

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Details

Medium: acrylic on canvas laid on board
Year: 1994

Canvas size: 12.5 x 16"
Framed size: 16.5 x 20"

Signature: estate stamp on verso

Reference:

SFP94-8

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 (SFP94-8), 1994

$98,500.00

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