Gillian Ayres C.B.E., R.A.

(British, 1930-2018)

Winter Landscape 36.8 x 53.4 cm. (14 1/2 x 21 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
The Artist, from whom acquired by
Michael Greenwood, thence by descent to the present owners
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
Artists International Association Exhibition (details untraced)

Throughout her formal artistic education, Gillian Ayres had been thoroughly put off by the prosaic, repetitive, and myopic mindset of her tutors. Desperate to leave St Paul's Girls School, she moved on to Camberwell Art School, but here she encountered the same problem: a distinct lack of freedom. Later, she would remark that she felt no particular desire to be subversive in of itself, reflecting not a rebellion against what was, but a yearning for what was not.

She left Camberwell a month before her final examination, spending a short period in Cornwall before moving back to London, eventually taking a job at the Arts International Association Gallery in Lisle Street. A perfect role for Ayres, she was now immersed in the middle of a theoretically fast-moving circle, largely of abstract leaning. She became close friends with constructivist painter Adrian Heath, the Association's chairman, and Roger Hilton. In such company Ayres' principle influences were like her – forward thinking, philosophically engaged, and committed to the idea that the viewer's focus should be on the canvas itself, rather than what it depicts.

Over the course of the 1950s she would develop an electric, highly distinctive style of abstraction, defined by a sublime sense of colour, space, and shape. The present and following three lots trace this important period in Ayres development – each of which have been acquired directly from the artist by the collector Michael Greenwood. An architect, Greenwood played a further pivotal role in Ayres career when in 1957 he commissioned her to paint four large murals for his new building at South Hampstead High School.

We are grateful to Sam Mundy for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.