Marlow (née Marjorie Jewel) Moss studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Académie Moderne in Paris, meeting fellow pioneer in abstraction Piet Mondrian and Dutch author Netty Nijhoff, who became Moss’ lifelong partner. In 1931 she was a founder member of the Abstraction-Création Group. At the start of the Second World War, Moss left France for Cornwall, settling in Penwith but worked outside the St Ives circle of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. She later turned to sculpture and held solo London shows at émigré gallerist Erica Brausen’s Hanover Gallery in 1953 and 1958, exhibiting with the WIAC in the mid-1950s. As with painting, Moss’ sculptural compositions were organised according to mathematical and geometrical rules. One reviewer of the 1958 show observed: ‘The sculptures are superb, objects of austere, calculated beauty.’