Sam Francis

Sam Francis

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To Hölderlin
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Current Museum exhibition

Opening exhibition at the Museum Reinhard Ernst, Wiesbaden, from 23 June 2024

with Josef Albers, John Chamberlain, Sam Francis, K. O. Götz, Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Frank Stella, Fred Thieler, Günther Uecker, among others

Colour is everything! is the title of the opening exhibition at the Reinhard Ernst Museum. It presents a selection of paintings and sculptures from Reinhard Ernst’s high-profile private collection. The works are on view for the first time in the museum’s unique architectural setting designed by Fumihiko Maki.

The exhibition’s starting point and leitmotif is an in-depth exploration of colour, the passion of the museum’s founder and Wiesbaden-based entrepreneur. The focus of the presentation is Abstract Painting from Europe, USA and Japan from the last 75 years.

Although the assembled artists worked at different times and in different places, they all show a radically new understanding of painting, thus changing the history of art forever.

Colour is literally everything. In each exhibition room, thought-provoking reflections on the theme of colour entice visitors: ‘Colour’s Dimension’ surprises with its large-format, two-dimensional works that celebrate the experience of space. Colour can go ‘against limits’ of common expectations. Colour can also provide security and a ‘home in painting’. Each new generation of artists uses colour to find answers to the questions of their time, so ‘The Beat Goes On’.

Colour is everything. Everywhere.

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Biography

Sam Francis is one of the most important American artists, born in San Mateo (California) in 1923 and died in Santa Monica in 1994. After a plane crash while serving in the US Air Force, he began painting in 1944 while recovering, then studied with David Park at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. His early abstractions, which are still reminiscent of Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollock, show spontaneous painterly gestures that lead to the typical American "all over" structure: the canvas is entirely covered with dots, stains, markings and other traces of the brush the painter's covered. When Francis stayed in Paris from 1950 to 1957, he gave up color and broke new ground with works such as “White Painting” (1950). But as early as the summer of 1951 in the south of France he was using pink and red again, only to return to the entire range later. Sometimes he uses all colors and their variants in the tone, sometimes he lets one color predominate, as in "Blue Balls" (1960). Although Francis has been associated with color field painting, it must be seen as an aid to classification that should help one to cope with a highly original imagery. If "fields" appear in Francis, they are almost never (if ever) color fields. Instead, they have an interplay of foreground and background. Often they create depth, which makes the canvas more of a “color space”.

It is typical of Sam Francis' pictorial strategies that he often leaves the center of the picture free and empty and concentrates on the edges of the picture. These pictures find their counterbalance in the oeuvre in those in which he does exactly the opposite. Sometimes his works are interwoven with central geometric structures, or merge with a pictorial grid or grid that extends over the entire surface. This can go as far as in “Blue and Yellow” (1954, ex Betty Freeman collection), where he closes the canvas and uses it as the basis for an abstract pattern structure.

After his death in 1994, Sam Francis' works continued to be shown in the most important international museums and galleries. The Samuelis Baumgarte Galerie last presented a large solo exhibition of his works in 2017.