Oil on linen canvas, 1958. 30x24 inches; 762x600 mm. Signed in oil, lower right recto. Signed and dated in pencil on the stretcher bars, verso.
Provenance: private collection, Mexico.
This striking abstraction is one of the earliest Emma Amos paintings we have seen. Amos likely painted this work in the spring of 1958 when she was a senior studying fine art at Antioch College in Ohio. Amos spent her fourth year abroad at the London Central School of Art, studying printmaking, painting, and weaving. After receiving a BA from Antioch, she returned to the Central School to earn a diploma in etching in 1959, and continued to pursue abstraction. She explored the boundaries of color and space and was influenced by Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting. She subsequently moved to New York where she joined the artist collective Spiral, founded by Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff, Norman Lewis and Charles Alston, as the sole female member. Another abstract oil painting from this London period, Shepherd's Path, 1958, was included in her retrospective Emma Amos: Color Odyssey, organized by Shawyna Harris in 2021 at the Georgia Museum of Art.
