Aubrey Williams travelled to London from Guyana in 1952 touring Britain and Europe extensively to examine works of modernist painters admired since he was a child. Throughout the 1950s and '60s Williams developed his art practice, exhibiting in the UK and abroad. He spent time in Italy, France and Germany, and enrolled at St Martin's School of Art in London. The 1956 and 1959 Tate American Abstract Expressionism exhibitions – particularly works of Pollock, Rothko and Gorky – greatly inspired Williams. During the 1970s and '80s Williams' painted in Jamaica and Florida, able to take advantage of light and environment as they impacted his resulting work.
Read MoreThe early 1980s witnessed Williams' tour de force: two series both of large-scale paintings: one abstract series expressing his passionate encounter with the music of Dimitri Shostakovich and the other, entitled Olmec-Maya (1981-1984), drawing on his deep knowledge of historic Mesoamerican cultures. October Gallery has represented Williams from its first solo show of his work in 1984. Williams has been exhibited in a wide range of contexts and institutions, including Rasheed Araeen's The Other Story (1989), the Whitechapel Art Gallery's major retrospective, and a room display at Tate Britain. In 2010, October Gallery linked with the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool to produce two simultaneous Aubrey Williams exhibitions. In 2014, a symposium on his work was held at Cambridge University with another at October Gallery in 2015, highlighting the fact that his works still resist classification while attracting ever more attention.
Williams' recent and upcoming exhibitions include: The Gift of Art (2018) at the Perez Museum; Get Up, Stand Up Now (2019) at Somerset House; Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 50s – Now (2021) at Tate Britain; Post-War Modern New Art in Britain 1945–1965 (2022) at the Barbican; Fragments of Epic Memory (2021) at the Art Gallery of Ontario and AfroScots: Revisiting the Work of Black Artists in Scotland (2022) at Glasgow Museums.
With Williams paintings and archives accessible in public collections including Tate Britain, London; Arts Council England; Natural History Museum, London; and Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; the increasing recognition of his unique place in British art history continues to be explored.
Text courtesy October Gallery.
