Jennifer Johnson is an art historian working on materialities and process in French and British art in the late 19th and 20th centuries. She has held lectureships in art history and English literature at the University of Oxford, and was a Junior Research Fellow in History of Art at St John’s College, Oxford. Her first book, Georges Rouault and Material Imagining was published by Bloomsbury in 2020. In 2024/5 she will be the Paul Mellon Fellow at the British School in Rome, working on the British abstract painter, Sandra Blow.

Abstract
This paper considers the work of Sandra Blow (1925-2006), an abstract painter working in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. However, finding art education in London unsatisfactory, Blow spent 1947 in Rome, where she met Alberto Burri. From this association, Blow learned the processes and materialities of ‘matter painting’ and art informel. However, where Burri’s material realism lent weight to the political resonances of matter and material, Blow remained wedded to an exploration of aesthetic qualities such as line and form, as well as to core questions about the energy and emotive presence of a painting. In this, her work remained detached from associations with landscape or figuration that were forming different schools of abstraction in Britain. Instead, her process continually explored the expression of a kind of formalism – wholly different in kind from abstract expressionism or action painting.
This paper looks at the significance of 1947 and Blow’s experience of Italy and Burri’s art, as a moment that committed her work in the 1950s -1970s to matter and materialism as a way of pursuing abstraction in a manner that has not been comfortably associated with female painters in Britain.

Image: Sanda Blow ‘Space and Matter’, 1959, Tate Galleries, London