“The 1970s saw a remarkable flowering in Sam Francis’s evolution as a painter and visual thinker. This was arguably his most spectacularly innovative decade, a period of pictorial and conceptual ideas in dynamic flux as the artist configured, deconstructed, and reconstructed colour, form, and space in muscular expansions and contractions… During the fertile middle of his career, negative space made Francis’s paintings recognisable as unquestionably his. Cocooning and contextualizing his exuberant, saturated forms—negative space defined his stylistic fingerprint.”