Works
Biography

Sandra Blow trained at St Martin’s School of Art, 1941-1946, and the Royal Academy, 1946 -1947. Although formatively trained as a figurative artist, she converted to pure abstraction in 1947 after meeting the Italian artist Alberto Burri at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome.

 

Producing abstract art in the fifties was a radical vocation; being a female artist working in an abstract idiom, even more so. Despite this Blow secured her first solo exhibition at Gimpel Fils in 1951, with a further solo show following in New York the same year. In 1958, she won an International Guggenheim award and was represented at the Venice Biennale.

 

In 1957 Blow visited Cornwall and subsequently re-located there from London for a year, staying near to her friend Patrick Heron. After 1958 she made frequent visits to West Penwith and became an associate member of the Penwith Society.

 

Her work is included in numerous collections including the Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Arts Council of England and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1963, 1967 and 1985, and had a retrospective exhibition in the Sackler Galleries of the Royal Academy in 1994, the same year as her work Green and White was purchased under the Chantrey Bequest for the Nation.