Gillian Ayres exhibition review – a masterclass in abstract expressionism

The term “abstract expressionism” normally brings to mind the colourful chaos of a Jackson Pollock-splodged canvas or the calm, meditative colours of Mark Rothko. Gillian Ayres is a far less well-known name in comparison to these titans of contemporary art – unjustly so.

Ayres (1930 – 2018) was a British painter and printmaker who was nominated for the Turner Prize. After attending St Paul’s Girls’ School, she studied art at Camberwell. Her work and career resisted categorisation: she exhibited with the London Group in 1951, before having a solo show at Gallery One in 1956, and appearing in the Whitechapel Gallery’s seminal “British Painting in the 60s” exhibition. Ayres may be somewhat less remembered now, but she was a prominent figure in the art world in her day: she continued working and exhibiting up until her death at the age of 88, and she became a Royal Academician in 1991.

The exhibition at Marlborough Gallery features Ayres’s largest paintings: nearly floor-to-ceiling canvases of bright colour, thick paint, and bold marks. The influence of Jackson Pollock – one Ayres struggled to admit – looms large, but it would be wrong to argue that these works or her style are derivative. The vitality, movement, and intensity are fundamentally original.

Most of the paintings are from the later period of Ayres’s work: the riotous movement of Ding Dong Merrily on High (1989) is prefigured in the darker ferocity of Sabrina (1978-9) and Phosphor (1979-80). Ayres was reticent to define whether her work was abstract or not – and in this exhibition is a hint of the more concrete forms she painted: The Bee Loud Glade (1987) is a fairy-tale-like world of looming mushrooms and flowers, whilst Cuckoo Time (1987) appears to play on the conventions of landscape painting with its interlocking blocks of colour appearing like the squares of fields in a valley.

When talking about her painting, Ayres said, “it’s like tennis, you can suddenly sense that you are going to make a shot better than you usually do”. Her metaphor not only emphasises the near-unconsciousness of Ayre’s work but also its physicality; Ayres had to move like a tennis player in order to be able to cover these wall-sized canvases. This physicality is visible in the finished works: paint is piled so thickly on the canvas that at points the works feel more sculptural than one-dimensional. Ayres made no attempt to hide the processes and techniques behind her creations – rather, these processes are visible as the final creation itself.

A much-repeated observation about impressionism is that the paintings become almost meaningless when viewed up close – little more than a collection of tiny marks. The same cannot be said of Ayres’s work: her paintings delight and mesmerise on both the large scale and the small.  

Upstairs in the exhibition is a collection of Ayres’ works on paper. After the dramatic canvases, these untitled pastel drawings and gouaches feel quiet and, at times, serene. But their small size belies a continued intensity: Ayres’s same commitment to movement and form is visible on the page.

Ayres is a master of an abstract visual language that mixes both dramatic physicality and intricate ferocity – this exhibition is well worth seeing.

“Gillian Ayres” is on at the Marlborough Gallery in Mayfair, September 14 – October 30.