Vivian Springford, Untitled, 1971

Vivian Springford
1913 - 2003
Untitled, 1971
acrylic on canvas
38 1/2 x 51 in. (97.8 x 129.5 cm.), frame: 40 x 52 3/4 x 2 in. (101.6 x 134 x 5.1 cm.)

The Artist's Estate
Gary Snyder Fine Art, New York, New York
Peyton Wright Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Private Collection, New Mexico

Exhibited:
Vivian Springford: A Retrospective, Peyton Wright Gallery, August 2014

Vivian Springford (1913–2003) was a New York–based painter whose distinctive approach to abstraction developed out of the artistic ferment of the postwar period. Initially trained as a portraitist, Springford increasingly embraced abstraction during the 1950s and 1960s. Her friendship and decade-long studio association with artist Walasse Ting brought her into contact with figures including Sam Francis, Pierre Alechinsky, and Karel Appel. Working with poured and stained pigments, Springford developed a highly individual visual language in which translucent layers of color radiate and dissolve across the surface, creating compositions characterized by movement, luminosity, and an almost atmospheric sense of space.

Springford largely withdrew from the commercial art world after the 1960s and continued working privately until failing eyesight brought her career to an end in the 1980s. Decades of her work were subsequently rediscovered in storage in New York and brought to the attention of dealer Gary Snyder, who began exhibiting her paintings in 1998. The present work comes directly from the Estate of Vivian Springford and was acquired from Gary Snyder Fine Art, New York, by Peyton Wright Gallery in 2015. It was also included in Peyton Wright Gallery’s 2014 retrospective devoted to Springford’s work, providing an important exhibition and provenance history for the painting.

Condition
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