Skidmore Contemporary Art
presents
AUGUSTUS FRANCIS:
Diffused Matter
Installation view of Augustus Francis: Diffused Matter
at Skidmore Contemporary Art, Laguna Beach, California.
ON VIEW NOW
SPECIAL RECEPTION FOR THE ARTIST
6PM THURSDAY FEB 5, 2026
AT SKIDMORE CONTEMPORARY ART.
326 North Coast Highway,
Laguna Beach, California
On view through February 15, 2026
Diffused Matter is the second exhibition of paintings by Augustus Francis at Skidmore Contemporary Art. In 2022 Beyond the Sea, Paintings and Sculpture was presented in at the gallery's Santa Monica location in partnership with Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art, Los Angeles California. His most recent exhibition Augustus Francis: Materia Prima was presented by ACA Galleries in 2025 in New York City. Francis is also represented by American Contemporary Art Galleries in Horn Switzerland, and Munich, Germany.
Francis was born and raised in Los Angeles. In 1997 he moved to Lancashire in North West England. Following in the artistic footsteps of his parents, abstract landscape artist Margaret Francis and abstract expressionist Sam Francis, he earned his BA in Fine Art at Leeds Metropolitan University in 2009, completed an Internship at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in 2011, and then began to exhibit in Germany, France, Tokyo, and the United States. His work is in numerous public and private collections internationally including the Porsche family collection in Germany and The Frederick R. Weisman Foundation of Art in Los Angeles, California.
Francis describes his work as "somewhere between color field painting and gestural abstraction" in which he attempts to evoke the sensation of the sublime, adding “I paint what I cannot see, I paint speed, I paint rhythm, I paint time, I paint gravity, I paint movement, I paint the immaterial not the material.”
PREVIEW THE SHOW
Augustus Francis
Blue Rhapsody
2025
Oil, wax, dry pigment, and synthetic resin on canvas
48” x 72”
Francis’s work often references the nonmateriality of music as foundational to his conception of painting. A rhapsody is a one-movement work that is episodic yet integrated, a free-flowing structure with highly contrasting moods and expansive tonal ranges.
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Augustus Francis
Architectonic Blue
2020
Oil, wax, dry pigment and synthetic resin on canvas
63” x 87”
With its immersively massive scale, Francis invites the viewer into Architectonic Blue, a truly sensorial experience. This physically commanding canvas’s multi-textured surface, with its material interplay of transparency and opacity, echoes the paradox of transformation, and the essential duality of space and matter.
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Augustus Francis
Green Gold Effervescence
2025
Oil, wax, dry pigment and synthetic resin on canvas
30” x 40”
In Francis’s approach to the canvas as a void from which material transformation occurs, he uses wax, pigment, and reflective materials to create unpredictable perspectives. His canvases become sites of discovery via experimental synthesis.
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Augustus Francis
Blue Thunder
2025
Oil, dry pigment and synthetic resin on canvas
30” x 40”
Once described as “a painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life,” Francis's abstraction functions as non-literal communication, evoking forces and energies independently derived, circumventing representational imagery.
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Augustus Francis
Excalibur's Wave
2022
Oil, dry pigment and synthetic resin on canvas
60” x 39”
Gnosis, the ultimate pursuit of alchemy, is a hidden, often ineffable knowledge gained through engagement with elemental forces. For some viewers Excalibur’s Wave may call to mind the legendary blade thrown by the acclaimed alchemist Merlin, presumably for safe keeping, into the lake of Avalon.
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Augustus Francis
Liquid Light Pink Vapor
2018
Oil, synthetic resin, and pigment on canvas
54" x 36"
Francis’s pouring of molten-like paint erupts with movement as if reacting to inner forces of combustion, capturing a vision of alchemical diffusion from solid states to liquid to etheric matter.
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AUGUSTUS FRANCIS:
Diffused Matter
Jan 2 through Feb 15, 2026
Augustus Francis’s practice is a meditation on movement, memory, and material. His work is a sustained inquiry into how abstraction can evoke the sublime as an evolving fusion of color, rhythm, and an ongoing pursuit of material experimentation. Francis reclaims abstraction not as a historic style but as a living language of sensation and transformation through discovery.
To explore other works of contemporary art available at
Skidmore Contemporary Art
please visit us at
Skidmore Contemporary Art
326 N Coast Hwy
Laguna Beach, California 92651
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To find out more please
reach out to
lia@liaskidmore.com
310-922-5070