Sandra Blow Overview
Sandra Blow is best known for her large-scale abstract collages, where she used paint and other ‘non-art’ materials like cement, tea and ash to create artworks that are both visually and texturally interesting. She was regarded as one of the pioneers of the British Abstract Movement of the 1950s.
Sandra Blow (British 1925-2006), "Flower Motif", acrylic on board canvas collage. Sold: £1,100
Born in London in 1925, Blow went on to study at Saint Martin’s School of Art, and then the Royal Academy Schools for a brief stint. Her time at the Royal Academy Schools was brief due to an incompatibility between herself and their style of teaching, which saw her leave after a year and enrol at Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, Italy, instead. Here, she met the artist Alberto Burri, whose movement towards Art Informel* heavily influenced Blow’s own journey with abstraction and her use of discarded, ‘non-art’ materials. By the 1950s, Blow’s work no longer referred to any content, but instead purely focused on the interplay between different collaged materials and the division and organisation of space. When she moved back to London, her work was exhibited with Gimpel Fils, an art gallery in London which was closely associated with the St Ives School of Art, and began Blow’s own association and connection with these artists and the town. Blow permanently moved to St Ives in the early 1990s where she built a studio. The influence of the Cornish landscape can be seen in the increasingly large scales of the artworks she produced there, and the use of local 'non-art' materials like sand she incorporated within them.
Blow exhibited widely throughout her career, both nationally and internationally. She was included in the Young Artists Section at the Venice Biennale in 1958, and made sales to art institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate. Whilst living in St Ives, she continued to participate in the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibitions, of which she was an elected member since 1979. At Wilson55, our in-house expert Stephen Sparrow has years of experience in assessing and valuing Sandra Blow’s work, so do get in touch if you’d like to learn more about a piece you own or discuss a potential sale or valuation.
Modern Art & Photography Directory
*also known as Informalism, which embraces chance and the randomness of gesture in the production of non-geometric abstract art
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