menu
ArchiveExhibition

Aubrey Williams: Future Conscious

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

October Gallery
London WC1N 3AL
Aubrey Williams, Towakaima, 1967, Gouache on paper, 56 x 73 cm. Credit: Copyright: © Estate of Aubrey Williams. All rights reserved, DACS, 2023. Courtesy the Artist and October Gallery, London. Photo: Jonathan Greet

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

Nearby

The Blue Hour
Union Pacific, WC1
until 4 May
Legion: life in the Roman army
The British Museum
until 23 Jun
Polly Braden: Leaving Ukraine
The Foundling Museum
until 1 Sep
Painting Freedom: Indian Modernism and its Three Rebels
Brunei Gallery, SOAS
until 22 Jun
Love Will Come Back: Ann Craven with Robert Mapplethorpe and Mohammed Z. Rahman
Phillida Reid
until 4 May
Paul Bonnet: Abeyance
MAMOTH
until 4 May
ANNA VAN OOSTEROM / MARY NORDEN: 'TORN'
Vivienne Roberts Projects
until 9 May
Audrey Gair: I Love Tomorrow
South Parade
until 27 Apr
Theodore Ereira-Guyer: The Second Heart
Cedric Bardawil
until 4 May
Sebastian Gordin: The Sound of an Engine Falling / Yuxiao Ran: Fable Boulevard
rosenfeld
until 6 May
Jason and the Adventure of 254
Wellcome Collection
until 12 Jan
Robyn Denny
Vardaxoglou Gallery
until 11 May
Betty Parsons
Alison Jacques
until 27 Apr
Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads
The Courtauld
until 27 May
Rebecca Manson: Leave Love Behind
Josh Lilley
until 27 Apr
Dead White Man: Effigies
Pi Artworks
until 8 Jun

Please log in or register to add a bookmark.