October Gallery at Frieze Masters
9th – 13th October, 2024
Oil on canvas, 80 x 90.5 cm.
Oil on canvas, 71 x 114 cm.
Aubrey Williams' distinctive contribution to 20th century British art was last year recognised when Tate Britain dedicated a room to works by this master of painterly abstraction, in their rehang of significant examples of British art.
Spanning four decades — from the 1950s to the 1980s — the selected works highlight the ground-breaking nature of this artist’s exploration of themes that include: ecology, cosmology, music and pre-colonial civilisations. Central to October Gallery’s presentation are early works from the 1950s and 1960s, including Summer, 1956, which was exhibited in Radical Landscapes at Tate Liverpool in 2022 and Time & Shadow, 1964, which demonstrates the artist’s lyrical organisation of form and colour. These works highlight Williams’ painterly techniques, and illustrate the manner in which he connected mind and hand to extraordinarily luminous effect. Having spent time among the indigenous Warrau people, in the Guyanese rainforest, Williams had a prescient understanding of the mounting problems impacting environmental and ecological stability that have recently become more widely felt. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, his ruminations on the rapid collapse of previous civilisations became a frequent topic of his canvases, eventually developing into his major body of work titled the Olmec-Maya and Now Series.
Born in Guyana in 1926, Aubrey Williams arrived in London, in 1952 to study painting. Throughout his career, he worked between studios in the UK, Jamaica and the US. A true polymath, Williams played an integral part in an explosion of optimistic creativity amongst writers, artists and intellectuals of the diaspora in London during the 1950s and 1960s.
Highly charged and often experimental, Williams’ intensely rich work is influenced by many, including Arshile Gorky, a precursor of abstract expressionism; Wilfredo Lam, who references African art motifs and Afro-Caribbean culture; and the American abstract expressionists of the 1950s.
With Williams’ paintings and archives accessible in public collections including Tate Britain, London; Arts Council England; Natural History Museum, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Government Art Collection, UK, Aubrey Williams’ unique place in British art history continues to be recognized.
Aubrey Williams: Art, Histories, Futures, the first major monograph on pioneering modernist Aubrey Williams, will be published on 22 October 2024. Revealing his extraordinary breadth of vision and dynamic work connecting Caribbean, British, and Atlantic histories, the mono-graph is edited by Ian Dudley and Maridowa Williams, with a foreword by Alex Farquharson, introduction by Kobena Mercer and is published by the Paul Mellon Centre: 384 pages: 254 x 203 mm, 200 colour + b-w illustrations, price: £40.00 hardback.
