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Gillian Ayres

 
Art Encyclopedia: Gillian Ayres

(b London, 3 Feb 1930). English painter. She studied at Camberwell School of Art, London (1946-50), where she detested the influence then prevalent of the EUSTON ROAD SCHOOL, and she worked at the AIA Gallery in London (1951-9) and the Bath Academy, Corsham, Wilts (1959-65). Painters such as Henry Mundy (b 1919), Roger Hilton, Robyn Denny (b 1931) and Howard Hodgkin were close friends. In 1960 she took part in the Situation exhibition at the RBA Galleries in London but, unlike most of her colleagues, who worked in a cool hard-edge style, she painted in a free tachist manner inspired in part by photographs of Jackson Pollock working on the floor. From 1964 to 1976 she worked in acrylic, producing powdery, close-toned canvases that were similar in their textures to the contemporary work of the Americans Jules Olitski and Larry Poons.

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Gillian Ayres OBE (born February 3, 1930) is an English painter.

Antony and Cleopatra, 1982, Tate Gallery.

Life and work

Gillian Ayres was born in Barnes in south-west London. She studied at the Camberwell School of Art where figurative art was promoted, which Ayres hated. She left in 1950 and began to paint abstracts, with her first solo exhibition coming in the mid-1950s. Ayres held a number of teaching posts through the 1960s and 1970s, becoming friends with painters such as Howard Hodgkin, Robyn Denny and Roger Hilton. In 1981 she moved to north Wales, and later to Cornwall.

Ayres' early works are typically made with thin vinyl paint in a limited number of colours arranged in relatively simple forms, but later works in oil paint are more exuberant and very colourful, with a thick impasto being used. The titles of her paintings, such as Anthony and Cleopatra (1982) and A Midsummer Night (1990), are usually given after the painting is completed and do not directly describe the content of the painting, but rather are intended to resonate with the general mood of the work.

Ayres was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989. She was made an OBE in 1986, and in 1991 became a Royal Academician [1]. She later temporarily resigned[2] from the Academy, in part because of the controversial Sensation exhibition hosted by the Academy in 1997, show-casing the Young British Artists. Her work can be seen on display at the Alan Cristea Gallery in London.

She married, and then divorced, the painter Henry Mundy. They have two sons.

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