Aubrey Williams
b. 1926, Guyana
d. 1990
Guyanese painter, 1926-1990
Aubrey Williams was born in 1926 in Georgetown, Guyana, the eldest of seven children. He joined the country’s first formal art institution, the Working People’s Art Class, while still at school. He went on to train as an agricultural field officer, a position that took him to the rainforests of Guyana, where he lived for two years among the indigenous Warao people. Looking back to this key influential period, Williams described it as instrumental in crystallising his sense of ‘… what art really is’.
Williams arrived in London in 1952, and travelled extensively around Britain and Europet o examine first-hand the works of modernist artists that he had admired since beginning to paint in his youth. His arrival came during a crucial period, when Caribbean artists and intellectuals were beginning to inject the capital with a vibrant creativity. Williams was a founding member of the Caribbean Artists Movement, which united Caribbean artists working in Britain to forge a new and modern sense of Caribbean aesthetics and identity. From the 1950s to the 1980s, he participated in group and solo exhibitions in London and abroad.
By the1980s, Williams had established studios in Jamaica and Florida, from where he delivered a tour de force of production: two astonishing series of large-scale paintings, both comprising around thirty works. In one, Williams expressed his lifelong passion for the music of Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich. In the other, The Olmec-Maya and Now, Williams drew on his profound knowledge of historical Mesoamerican cultures, which he depicted through abstraction and figuration. Alongside these series, he produced two further extensive bodies of work: one titled Cosmos, and an expansive collection of bird portraits.
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.
His work is held in important collections across the world, including the Victoria& Albert Museum, London, UK; St Catherine’s College, Oxford, UK; the University of Warwick, Coventry, UK; the Arts Council England, UK; and the Perez Museum of Art, Miami, USA.