Gillian Ayres is a painter, mural artist and teacher born in London in 1930. She studied at Camberwell School of Art and run for years the AIA Gallery with her husband, the painter Henry Mundy.

Her first solo show was in 1959 at Gallery One which was followed by an impressive series of exhibitions including shows at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, the Royal College of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, the Serpentine Gallery and Southampton City Art Gallery.

She taught at Bath Academy of Art, St Martin’s School of Art, Winchester School of Art and Royal College of Art. She produces colourful abstract paintings influenced by the European Post-war Abstraction and the American Expressionism: moreover she was inspired, in her early career, by the physical gestures of Pollock’s technique.

www.royalacademy.org.uk

Reference Bibliography:
Buckman D., 2006, Artists in Britain since 1945, Vol 1, Art Dictionaries Ltd, Bristol

Glossary

  • Abstraction

    To abstract means to remove, and in the art sense it means that artist has removed or withheld references to an object, landscape or figure to produce a simplified or schematic work. This method of creating art has led to many critical theories; some theorists considered this the purest form of art: art for art’s sake. Unconcerned as it is with materiality, abstraction is often considered as representing the spiritual.

Portfolio