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Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Guyanese pioneer of abstract art gets an 'overdue' reappraisal
A Guyanese pioneer of abstract art is receiving an 'overdue' reappraisal in the UK, including a new London exhibition at the October Gallery. Despite an ill-fated Paris encounter with Picasso, who dismissed him, painter Aubrey Williams was a 'respected figure in his lifetime,' The Guardian wrote, but faded from view after his death in 1990. Influenced in part by classical music and ancient civilizations, Williams was 'one of the ideas men' in the Caribbean Arts Movement, a scholar said. He also drew from his work as an agronomist in Guyana, which marked him out as 'ahead of his time,' October Gallery's artistic director said: 'He talked about ecological matters … I think now is his time, in a sense.'
The Guardian
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Ahead of his time': Guyanese artist gets London show amid reappraisal
An artist whose work was part of the first wave of abstract art to hit the UK and presaged the climate breakdown protests as well as debates over the legacies of British colonialism is undergoing an 'overdue' reappraisal, according to experts and critics. Aubrey Williams, the Guyanese artist who moved to Britain in the 1950s, was a respected figure in his lifetime and the subject of several exhibitions in the UK. But after his death from cancer in 1990, the artist's influence and the legacy of his abstract painting has slowly faded from view in Britain. 'His work was very dramatic with the huge canvases, and the colour was intense always,' says Chili Hawes of October Gallery, the institution that represented Williams during his lifetime. 'There was nothing pale about his work. He loved the drama; he loved the colour.' Williams spent most of his time in the UK after arriving in 1952 and also had studios in Miami and Jamaica. He mingled with art's great and good, once meeting Picasso in Paris after being introduced by Albert Camus. 'He said that I had a very fine African head and he would like me to pose for him … he did not think of me as another artist,' was how Williams recalled the meeting. Despite Picasso's dismissal, Williams was a key player in the Caribbean Artists Movement (Cam), which emerged in the mid-1960s in Britain and was founded by West Indian artists, authors and playwrights. Cam had two main aims: forcing their work into the mainstream and debating what black art should be in the post-colonial 20th century. Alongside the likes of John La Rose, Althea McNish and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Williams took part in small meetings, dubbed 'warshis' by Williams, an Amerindian word he encountered in Guyana, which meant meetings where people 'unburdened' themselves. 'He was one of the ideas men in Cam,' says the academic Malachi McIntosh, who is currently writing A Revolutionary Consciousness: Black Britain, Black Power, and the Caribbean Artists Movement, a new history of Cam, for Faber. 'The big schism that broke Cam apart was between people who were saying art needs to be engaged in the community. Others, including Williams, said artists need to have complete freedom,' McIntosh added. As with his fellow Guyanese artist Frank Bowling who had his first major retrospective at Tate Modern in 2019, and McNish, who had her own major touring exhibition in 2022, Williams has undergone a resurgence in interest. In 2010, his work was included in a landmark Afro Modern show at Tate Liverpool; and between 2022 and 2024 there was a room dedicated to his work. At last year's Frieze Masters, Williams was given a coveted place in the 'Spotlight' section, with curators billing him as someone who had 'taken painting into new territories'. Earlier this year Yale University Press released a book that was co-edited by his daughter Maridowa Williams and included critical responses to his work, diary entries and poetry. 'There has been such a shift in the reception of those artists,' says Hawes. 'But Aubrey needs to be paid particular attention to, because he was ahead of his time. He talked about ecological matters … I think now is his time, in a sense.' October Gallery's artistic director, Elisabeth Lalouschek, points out that Williams's work would also take all sorts of turns, such as his interest in the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. 'When you look at the symphonies of Shostakovich he was trying to paint music in colour and in form, which is, of course, a very difficult task,' she says. A new exhibition of Williams's work is opening this week at October Gallery, which takes in several decades of his work and explains how he was hugely influenced by his time working as an agronomist in Guyana. He initially came to Britain to study agricultural engineering at Leicester University, and his interests in ecological matters and the ancient cultures of the Mayan, Aztec and Olmec cultures was a regular feature in his art. The author Anne Walmsley, wrote in her Guardian obituary of Williams, that his 'enquiring mind is continually focused on the relationship between man and nature, and the mythological mysteries echoed in artefacts of past civilisations'. Aubrey Williams: Elemental Force is on at October Gallery, 22 May to 26 July
The Guardian
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
William S Burroughs's art: ‘He said, I killed the only woman I loved. Then broke down sobbing'
One day 51 years ago, out in the wilds of New Mexico, Kathelin Gray asked a question of her hero, the writer and artist William S Burroughs, whom she had just met. 'William, I have read your books and I must know: what is your attitude to women?' The question had been eating away at Gray for the best part of a decade. As a teenage babysitter, she read Burroughs' novel The Naked Lunch and was blown away by it. 'The very yuckiness of the imagery, the critique of predatory capitalism, the degrading sex and violence – all that spoke to me,' she says. A few years later she invited her hero to give a lecture at a ranch near Santa Fe where she and some like-minded souls had established the countercultural Institute for Ecotechnics, and he had accepted. But how could she square this inspirational writer with the man who killed his partner Joan Vollmer during a party at a friend's Mexico City apartment in 1951? 'Put that glass on your head, Joanie,' Burroughs is reported to have said at the time. 'Let me show the boys what a great shot old Bill is.' Burroughs fired one shot from a Czech-made Star .380 pistol, missed the glass and killed her. The local papers wrote up the tragedy as a William Tell prank gone wrong. He was never prosecuted. And yet, even today, at a time when the late writer and artist is coming to the attention of a new generation thanks to the film adaptation of his story Queer starring Daniel Craig, the suggestion that he was a lowlife heroin- and-booze addicted woman-hater who intended to shoot his common-law wife (the pair were not married) won't go away. A recent profile, for instance, described him as Joan Vollmer's murderer. 'It was an accident,' counters Gray. 'Of course he didn't intend to kill her.' How did Burroughs answer your question, I ask Gray? 'He stood stock still, looked into my eyes and said 'I killed the only woman I ever loved'. Then he broke down sobbing.' That evening, Burroughs entranced Gray and her compadres with a lecture given inside the Institute's geodesic dome on the theme of lingua-technis. Gray is recalling her meeting with Burroughs to me over coffee at the October Gallery in London, where she has curated an exhibition of rarely seen Burroughs artworks, made in the last decade of his life, from spray paint, acrylics – and gunshot. Until his death in 1997, she and Burroughs were close friends and she has spent much of her life since curating his art. 'There was nothing misogynistic about him at all,' he says. 'As a straight woman' – Burroughs was gay – 'I felt nothing but comfortable with him. He was a very sensitive soul, and that comes out in all his art, literary and visual.' Indeed, in a catalogue essay, Gray wrote. 'Burroughs could not bear the idea that anyone would suffer pain. He identified with patients of burn units, he identified with the endangered lemurs of Madagascar.' On the walls above us as we chat is his 1987 painting Burn Unit, a howl of red paint overlaid with crudely daubed human faces evidently in pain; above my head is his photomontage of lemurs in a flaming hellscape, expressing Burroughs's outrage at how slash-and-burn agriculture was destroying the animals' Malagasy habitat and driving them to extinction. Gray reminds me that in his 1991 novella Ghost of Chance, Burroughs meditated on whether our species could ever live in harmony with other life forms. For Gray, this compassionate late text poses a question that obsessed him: 'What is a human destiny that would be life-enhancing, not destructive to other beings? Perhaps,' Gray reflects, 'clues to that destiny will be found in dreams, in what's called subconscious, in altered states.' What Gray loves about Burroughs' art is how it always involves an element of chance, which she recognises as one of his manifold tactics for exploring the subconscious, entering transcendental realms or simply overcoming societal conditioning and egotistical control. That's why, she explains, when his artist friend Brion Gysin showed Burroughs his textual cut-up method in the late 1950s, he decided to adopt the practice in his writing – in turn inspiring David Bowie to randomise his lyrics. It's why too that, far from eschewing guns after Vollmer's death, Burroughs turned his studio into something akin to a rifle range, peppering paper, wood and canvases with bullets. Here at the October Gallery, several artworks betray his continued fascination with firepower. There is a free-standing plexiglass vitrine holding the bullet-ridden wreckage of a piece of painted wood. 'The shotgun blast,' wrote one critic, 'releases the little spirits compacted into the layers of wood, releases the colours of the paints to splash out in unforeseeable and unpredictable images and patterns.' Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion I tell Gray this reminds me of the auto-destructive art of Gustav Metzger who in 1959 launched this art movement by throwing hydrochloric acid at a nylon sheet on London's South Bank, thus creating voids in the surface akin to Burroughs' bullet holes. Metzger and Burroughs were friends, Gray tells me, and no wonder: the former was a Holocaust survivor, CND activist and lifelong foe of human destructive power; the latter, Gray reckons, was deranged into artistic expression by the advent of the atomic age, whereby humans finally had the power finally destroy themselves and their planet, fulfilling the logic of what Burroughs once called 'the death trap of the industrial revolution'. 'In thrall to the world market,' wrote Gray in a catalogue essay, 'humanity accelerates its rapacious behaviour using rationalisation … to justify the ravages of predatory capitalism. In his life and work, Burroughs deconstructed logic and rationalism to pursue other strategies of thought.' Fair enough, but the gun thing still troubles me. A 1992 work hanging nearby is called Brion's Birthday and consists of a marker sketch of his friend, his midriff riddled with bullet holes. Nearby, Warhol: A Portrait in TV Dots from the same year looks like a perforated rifle range target that, by happenstance, depicts the eponymous artist nearly shot dead in 1968 by Valerie Solanas. 'Europeans,' says Gray, 'always have a trouble with Americans and their guns. William was a very ordinary American in that sense.' Why is she putting on this show of Burroughs right now? 'Because he was on the money,' she replies. 'As someone else said of him, he was a Nostradamus – certainly when it came to climate catastrophe, which he foresaw clearly. He imagined, too, that anyone could achieve inner and outer liberation from the ravages being inflicted on the world. That's why his art matters to me – and why it's worth seeing right now.' William S Burroughs is at the October Gallery, London, until 5 April
The Guardian
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Cheeky monkeys, gored matadors and trompe l'oeil masks – the week in art
Alison Watt New paintings inspired by the sublime, poetic architecture of Georgian visionary Sir John Soane. Pitzhanger Manor, London, 5 March to 15 June William S Burroughs Artworks by the beat author whose best novel, Queer, was recently released as a film. October Gallery, London, 6 March to 5 April Ella KruglyanskayaSensual, haunting figurative paintings that pay homage to Manet's depiction of a dead matador. Thomas Dane Gallery, London, until 3 May Rhea StorrA film that documents Caribbean community groups in Wolverhampton and Sheffield. Site Gallery, Sheffield, until 25 May Tim StonerNew abstract paintings with verve, complexity and beauty. Pace gallery, London, 5 March to 12 April Forty-five years after it was bought for a then record price, doubt has been cast over the authenticity of this painting, Samson and Delilah by Peter Paul Rubens. In a new book, art historian Euphrosyne Doxiadis argues that 'the flowing, twisting brushstrokes that are so characteristic of Rubens are nowhere to be seen', and that what the National Gallery has on its wall is actually a 20th-century copy of a now lost painting by the 17th-century Flemish master. Read the full story Siena was a dazzling centre of the medieval art world Lubaina Himid will represent Britain at the 2026 Venice Biennale Leeds-based photographer Peter Mitchell had a correspondence with Nasa Crime-obsessed photographer Weegee still shocks today The arts sector may be breaking the law with its use of interns Leigh Bowery was the ultimate exhibitionist, and also Lucian Freud's muse Women are outperforming men in Africa's art market Photography is therapy for Martin Parr Still Life with Fruit and Vegetables with Two Monkeys by Jan Roos, circa 1620 Grapes glisten and apples shine in this depiction of a cornucopian mass of beautifully luscious fruit. It's a still life to make you slaver, yet the luxurious assembly of refreshing edibles is being stolen by two naughty monkeys who are portrayed with the same keen eye as the fruits. One is howling its excitement to the other as it holds delicious loot in each hand. Whichever human aristocrat or merchant was planning to gorge on these treats is due to be disappointed. It is an image of entropy undermining order; chaos coming for civilisation. Such intimations of decay and ultimately of mortality are common in 17th-century still life paintings, which sometimes swarm with insects or even reptiles, not to mention the odd human skull among the luxuries. But Roos takes a novel, comic line with his acute portrayal of mischievous monkeys. National Gallery, London If you don't already receive our regular roundup of art and design news via email, please sign up here. If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email newsletters@
