Talks & Events

Talk

Gallery Talk: Aubrey Williams: Dr. Hew Locke OBE RA, Dr. Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani and Dr. Indie Choudhury

29 May 2025 6.30-8pm

October Gallery

London WC1N 3AL

Overview

Join artist Hew Locke, art historian and curator Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani, for a discussion about Williams’ innovative approach to his artistic practice.

About the Speakers:

Dr. Hew Locke OBE RA was born in Edinburgh, raised in Guyana and lives in London. He knew Aubrey Williams personally from when he was a child in Guyana.

In 2022, Locke's installation The Procession was presented by Tate Britain, London and he also was commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, to create work for its façade, titled Gilt. He recently curated the exhibition, What Have We Here? at The British Museum, London. Locke’s public artworks include The Jurors, marking 800 years of Magna Carta, in Runnymede, Surrey. In July, his series of bronze boats Cargoes, reflecting the history of trade on the Thames, will be unveiled in King Edward Memorial Park, London. A retrospective of his exhibition and monograph Passages, will open at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, this October.

Dr. Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani is an art historian and curator specialising in modern and contemporary art of the global diasporas, focussing on the postcolonial histories of African, Afro-Caribbean, Asian and Black British art in Britain and beyond.

She earned her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin under the supervision of Dr. Eddie Chambers for her dissertation “The Commonwealth of Abstraction: Black Artists in London, 1948-72”(2019). As a postdoctoral research associate at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven Connecticut, she co-curated the exhibition Bridget Riley: Perceptual Abstraction (2022), and has held numerous curatorial positions, including the Wichita Art Museum and the Ulrich Museum of Art, in Wichita, Kansas, USA; the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, USA; and Tate Liverpool, UK. Maryam has published widely on diasporic artists including Denis Williams, Frank Bowling, and the Caribbean Artists Movement.

Dr. Indie A. Choudhury is an art historian and curator. She holds the post for Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art at The Courtauld Institute of Art (Global Black Diasporas and Black Studies). She is currently working on the first monograph of Frank Bowling’s White Paintings as a body of work spanning more than six decades of his career. Recent and forthcoming publications include Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin published by Duke University Press and on Hew Locke published by Yale University Press. Recent exhibitions include In Praise of Black Errantry for Unit London at the Venice Biennale 2024.

Aubrey Williams: Elemental Force at October Gallery runs from 22nd May – 26th July, 2025 Williams’ work can be viewed as a uniquely evolved expression of abstraction and a powerful contribution to post-war art. In displaying his intuitive grasp of the possibilities open to abstraction, these striking works deploy an entirely original use of colour. The range of paintings underline the breadth of Williams’ interests: ecology, cosmology, music and pre-colonial civilisations.

Artists

Aubrey Williams

Guyanese, 1926-1990

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