Where Color Begins

Hollis Taggart is pleased to present Where Color Begins: Works on Paper by Sam Francis, a focused exhibition of 13 gouache and watercolor paintings by the influential postwar abstractionist. On view in the gallery’s first floor Annex space, the exhibition presents a curated group of works that reflect Francis’s deep engagement with color, gesture, and light. These works on paper—fluid, immediate, and often experimental—embody the distinctive vitality he discovered in the medium. Where Color Begins: Works on Paper by Sam Francis will be on view from June 18 through July 18, 2025, with an opening reception on Friday, June 20, from 6-8PM.

Where Color Begins explores how Francis embraced paper not merely as a support, but as a dynamic field where ideas could unfold with spontaneity. It became a space for testing the limits of chromatic energy, where intuitive movement met deliberate attention to negative space, and where process itself often emerged as the point.

Born in San Mateo, California, in 1923, Francis came to painting through unlikely circumstances. After a serious spinal disease in his early twenties, he spent several years in recovery, much of it bedridden. It was during this period that he began painting, studying with Bay Area artist David Park. Park’s emphasis on intuitive, gestural mark-making left a lasting imprint. “Painting,” Francis later reflected, “was my way back to life.” Once recovered, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, eventually leaving behind his medical studies to fully commit to art.

In 1950, Sam Francis moved to Paris, just as New York was becoming the epicenter of the art world. Rather than follow the gravitational pull of the New York School, he charted an independent path, immersing himself in the legacy of French modernism—particularly the work of Matisse, Bonnard, and Monet, whose use of color, light, and spatial openness deeply informed his sensibility. Though he maintained a physical and philosophical distance from New York, Francis remained central to the discourse of Abstract Expressionism, with his early inclusion in MoMA’s landmark Twelve Americans exhibition (1956) and relationships with key New York dealers like Martha Jackson and André Emmerich. Over the decades, Francis’s practice unfolded across studios in Paris, Tokyo, Bern, Los Angeles, and Santa Monica, where he developed a luminous, improvisational style that infused Abstract Expressionism with a distinctly cross-cultural perspective. His works on paper—widely regarded as among the most exceptional in his celebrated oeuvre—embody the global reach of his vision and his role as a vital link between American abstraction and international modernism.

The works in this exhibition, created between the 1960s and 1990s, distill many of the essential elements of Francis’s visual vocabulary. Swirls of pigment, cascading drips, and radiant washes hover around blank or lightly stained voids—or coalesce into dense, atmospheric fields. The oscillation between negative space and chromatic saturation reveals Francis’s enduring preoccupation: where emptiness ends, and where color begins. These works pulse with motion, tension, and breath—what art historian Peter Selz once described as Francis’s signature sense of “suspension and levitation,” a marked contrast to the grounded intensity of Abstract Expressionism.

Francis held a particular affinity for working on paper, once noting, “Paper is much more beautiful than canvas… I like the way the paint flows into the fiber.” His works on paper were not side projects or studies, but complete, self-contained compositions. The format enabled a kind of immediacy and risk-taking that was essential to his process. Many of his most inventive explorations of color and form took shape here, in works that feel at once deliberate and open to chance.

For more information about Where Color Begins: Works on Paper by Sam Francis, please contact us at info@hollistaggart.com or +1 212.628.4000.

For press inquiries, please contact Aga Sablinska at aga.sablinska@gmail.com or +1 862.216.6485.