You and up to 6 friends will have a tour led by Adam Gross, Director of The Lapis Press in LA.
Winner will take home the Sam Francis lithograph, (Untitled, SF-265) #23/25, valued at $2500. “Lapis is an artist’s toolbox,” explains Adam Gross, director of Culver City’s The Lapis Press, a studio and publishing house known for its ultraspecialized, limited-edition works. “We create an environment for artists to work—in collaboration with our team of professional craftspeople—to create something that furthers their oeuvre.”
The Lapis Press is committed to collaborating with contemporary visual artists throughout the world who possess a unique and uncompromising vision. Lapis provides a dynamic and enriching environment that enables artists to articulate work in any medium. Lapis is dedicated to achieving the level of trust necessary to realize successful editions. The quality and relevance of the work produced is a direct result of the enduring relationships Lapis cultivates with its artists.
The Lapis Press was founded in 1984 by artist Sam Francis with the goal of producing unusual and timely texts in visually compelling formats. Published editions comprised poetry, fiction, and essays on contemporary art, philosophy, literature and Jungian psychology. During this time, Lapis also published books created in collaboration with significant contemporary artists.
These livres d'artiste employed a variety of media, including lithographs, etchings, and letterpress, printed on specially selected papers, and bound by hand. After the death of Sam Francis in 1994, The Lapis Press honored his legacy of collaboration by producing a series of etching editions with contemporary artists such as Vija Celmins, Rebecca Horn, Anish Kapoor, Guillermo Kuitca, Ed Moses, Gabriel Orozco, Guiseppe Penone, Martin Puryear, David Reed, Ed Ruscha, Niki de Saint Phalle, Robert Therrien and Christopher Wool. When the Estate of Sam Francis closed in 2004, The Lapis Press embarked on a new program designed to create synergy between the dynamic art scene outside of America and the vitality of the blossoming cultural climate in Los Angeles.
An artist residency program was established in 2005 to provide visiting artists with housing and studio space. Residency artists have included, Elger Esser, Georg Herold, Graciela Iturbide, Rinko Kawauchi, Stephen Shore, THE LA BREA MATRIX (with Jens Liebchen, Max Regenberg, Oliver Sieber, Olaf Unverzart, Robert Voit and Janko Woltersmann), Doktor Lakra and Didier Vermeiren. The Lapis Press is also committed to publishing work with important emerging and established artists. We continue to honor Sam Francis's legacy of collaboration by embracing new technologies and techniques. The Lapis Press has been described as an artist's toolbox— evolving with the ever expanding scope of an artist's imagination.
Artist: Sam Francis
Title: (Untitled, SF-265)
Year created: 1982
Medium: Lithograph
Signed by the artist
Edition: Signed in pencil on recto at bottom right edge, editioned at bottom left.
Height (inches): 42
Width (inches): 30
This piece is unframed.
Includes a certificate of authenticity.
Sam Francis was an American artist known for his exuberantly colorful, large-scale abstract paintings. His practice incorporated elements from Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, Impressionism, and Eastern philosophy to create a unique style of painterly abstraction. Influenced by Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still, he is more closely associated to the work of Helen Frankenthaler, as he was more interested in the formal arrangement of the picture plane than the expressivity of the individual artist. “Painting is about the beauty of space and the power of containment,” he once reflected. Born on June 25, 1923 in San Mateo, CA, he briefly served in the US Air Force during World War II but was injured during a test flight. Returning to California, he received his BA and MA from UC Berkeley in botany and psychology before beginning to pursue a career in art. The artist traveled widely during his career, and he was closely aligned with the Art Informel movement while living abroad in Paris during the 1950s. Francis died on November 4, 1994 in Santa Monica, CA at the age of 71. He was a founding trustee of Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and his paintings can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Kunstmuseum Basel, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, among others.
Experience