Artist     Gillian Ayres
Title      Mambo
Date      2000's
object    Painting
Media    oil
Size       122 x 121cm
Ref         952

Diploma work kindly donated in 2004

Other websites featuring this artist's work
www.rwa.org.uk/memfrm.htm

Mambo
Born in 1930, Gillian Ayres decided to become a painter at the age of fourteen, and studied at Camberwell School of Art from 1946-50, before running the AIA Gallery with the painter Henry Mundy

As a young artist in the 1950's, Ayres was closely involved with leading British abstract artists including Howard Hodgkin, Robyn Denny and Roger Hilton. Ayres was quick to respond to European tachism and American abstract expressionism, creating a body of work that placed her in the forefront of her generation. In the sixties she was the only woman artist to be represented in the important 'Situation' exhibitions, showing large paintings combining oil and paint that aimed for the sublime using very radial drip and pour techniques of action painting.

Gillian Ayres defined her career by ranges of style and manner. In the sixties she created vibrant and decorative images in keeping with the hedonistic mood of that time. In the seventies hr work was inspired by Hans Hofmann and she turned back to an extreme and painterly abstraction. Later in that decade Ayres moved back to oil painting and went on to develop her exclusive colourful style and has made an impressive mark on British art. The work in the RWA collection is typical of her exuberant style and energetic mark-making. Mel Gooding’s monograph Gillian Ayres of 2001 (published by Lund Humphries, London and coinciding with a major show of her work at the RWA galleries) examines the impact of an artist with a distinctively colourful and allusive style, who has created ‘some of the most richly sensuous images in recent British art.’

Her first solo show was at Gallery One in 1956, although she featured in many key group shows thereafter, for example Whitechapel Art Gallery's seminal British Painting in 1965. Her solo shows however, are an impressive list: Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1981; Serpentine Gallery, 1983; and the Royal Academy in 1997. Ayres was made an OBE in 1986, and in 1991 became a Royal Academician. She later temporarily resigned from the Academy, in part because of the controversial Sensation exhibition hosted by the Academy in 1997, show-casing the so-called Young British Artists.

She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989.

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