ArchiveExhibition

Aubrey Williams: Future Conscious

15 Jun-29 Jul 2023
PV 14 Jun 2023, 6-8.30pm

October Gallery

London WC1N 3AL

Overview

October Gallery presents Future Conscious, a solo exhibition comprising a selection of recently rediscovered paintings and works on paper by Aubrey Williams. The exhibition spans three decades — from the 1960s to the 1980s — and highlights Williams’ prescient understanding of, and concerns regarding, the mounting problems impacting environmental and ecological stability.

Williams, often cited as being ahead of his time, trained as an Agricultural Officer in Guyana in the early 1940s. He was finely attuned to the complexities of these interactive systems in ways that anticipated, by decades, our own recent awakening to the urgency and seriousness of the environmental crises now looming over humanity. Williams’ work can be viewed as a uniquely evolved expression of abstraction and as a powerful contribution to a post-war artistic sensibility. The works exhibited in Future Conscious show a striking and comprehensive use of colour, with a complex blend of abstraction and petroglyphic iconography.

There has recently been a major renewal of interest in Williams’ work as shown by his increasing prominence in significant international survey exhibitions, such as the seminal Fragments of Epic Memory at the Art Gallery of Ontario and Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945–1965 at the Barbican, London, a timely reassessment of an artist whose distinctive body of work has frequently defied mainstream art conventions. Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s – Now at Tate Britain (2021–2022) positioned Williams’ work as a critical point of focus for the exhibition, juxtaposing seminal canvases alongside less familiar paintings. In another major exhibition, The Earth Will Open Its Mouth, Williams’ work was used as a revelatory counterweight, providing contrast and context alongside pieces by the surrealist, impressionist artist Erna Rosenstein at Museum Sztuki in Lodz, Poland.

Artists

Aubrey Williams

Guyanese, 1926-1990

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