Sandra Blow: University Gallery & Baring Wing

Sandra Blow A pioneer of the British post-war abstract movement Sandra Blows work started in the radical atmosphere of the pre-Arte Povera movement under the influence of Alberto Burri, and she remained loyal to the language of abstraction throughout her career. Burri introduced her to paintings and assemblages created with sackcloth and ashes, the only materials available to him as a prisoner of war. Fuelled also by the Renaissance principles of geometry, light and scale, Blow set about treating form with its own innate reality and rejecting subject matter in terms of representation, I can remember that extraordinary sense of shedding everything, of leaving all known tracks and then just looking for something that could be my own, of interpreting the actual structure of the painting, which seems to connect with abstract structure and space and finding my own language in it! University Gallery, Northumbria University, Sandyford Road, Newcastle. www.northumbria.ac.uk/universitygallery