
Penny Day
Head of UK and Ireland
Sold for £21,250 inc. premium
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Provenance
Sale; Sotheby's, London, 21 July 2005, lot 101, where acquired by the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.
The present work is an early formative abstract painting informed
by Sandra Blow's romantic friendship with the important post-war
Italian artist Alberto Burri (1915-1995), whom she was introduced to
by another artist friend, Nicholas Carone upon her arrival in Rome in
1947. In terms of its arrangement, the inclusion of collaged sacking
and palette of red and black, Composition 1955 is indebted to the
Burri's Saachi paintings of the early 1950s. Blow comments, 'I think
that what really helped me with the formation of what I was doing
was the use of material, because I found that materials could speak,
in a way, or have a presence, a physical spatial relief effect which
also connected me to [Alberto] Burri, who was part of the art born in
me in Italy' (Michael Bird, Sandra Blow, Lund Humphries, Aldershot,
2005, p.46). However, Composition 1955 must not be confused for a
pastiche, Blow's inclusion of the grid device across the sacking and
the further non-traditional material of cut sand paper demonstrate an
individual artist wrestling with her own form of abstraction.