Sandra Blow, RA (English 1925-2006)
Sandra Blow studied at St Martin's School of Art from 1941 to 1946, at the Royal Academy Schools from 1946 to 1947, and subsequently at the Academy of Fine Arts, Rome from 1947 to 1948. She travelled to Spain and France in the late 1940s, worked in Cornwall for a year from 1957 to 1958 and went on to teach at the Royal College of Art from 1960.
Blow's first solo exhibition was at Gimpel Fils in 1951, where she continued to exhibit regularly until the mid-sixties. Further solo shows were held at the New Art Centre, London (1966, 1968, 1971, 1973), at Clare College, Cambridge (1968) and at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (Diploma Gallery) in 1979. More recently, a retrospective of her work was held in the Sackler Galleries at the Royal Academy in 1994. Blow also participated in many international group exhibitions from an early stage. These included; 'Young British Painters', at The Art Club, Chicago (1957), which subsequently toured the USA for two years; the Venice Biennale - Young Artists Section (1958); 'Aspects of New British Art', British Council touring exhibition of Australia and New Zealand (1967); and 'St Ives' held at the Tate Gallery, London (1985). More recently her work has been regularly included in group exhibitions at the Tate Gallery, St Ives, and in other shows throughout the UK.
Blow's awards include joint-winner of the International Guggenheim Award (The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1960), Second Prize Winner in the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition (1961 and 1965) and the Korn Ferry Picture of the Year Award, Royal Academy (1998). In 1994 her work 'Green and White' was purchased under the terms of the Chantrey Bequest for the Nation. Among her recent commissions are a glass screen for Heathrow Airport (commissioned by the BAA in 1995), and illustrations for 'Waves on Porthmeor Beach', by Alaric Sumner (Wordsworth Books, 1995).
An abstract painter who has also used materials such as polyethylene, and willow cane to construct pictures. Blow has been said to be concerned pre-eminently with the problems of pure painting: balance and proportion, tension and scale. She was appointed Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art in 1973.
Public collections
Tate Britain
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Arts Council of Great Britain
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Contemporary Arts Society, London
The British Council
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Arts Council of Northern Ireland
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
Felton Bequest, Melbourne, Australia
Nuffield Foundation
Nuffield Pictures for Hospitals for Children
Peter Stuyvesant Collection
Department of the Environment
Department of Education and Science
County Borough of Dudley
Carlisle Public Museums and Art Gallery
Newnham College, Cambridge
Leeds City Art Gallery
Leicester Museum and Art Gallery
Leicestershire Education Authority
Liverpool University
Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield
Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, London
Recent Solo Exhibitions
2006, Lemon Street Gallery, Truro
2004, Caroline Wiseman, London
2001, Tate St Ives
1997, New Millennium Gallery, St Ives
1994, Retrospective, Royal Academy of Arts, London
1991, Francis Graham-Dixon Gallery, London
Bibliography
M. BIRD, Sandra Blow, Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd, UK, 2005