FRANK AVRAY WILSON
“Frank Avray Wilson was one of the first British abstract expressionist painters” – Independent
Born in Mauritius, Frank Avray Wilson was a leading force of British Abstraction. In the mid 1950’s, having taken good note of the American contribution, he rebelled against the abuses of action painting and developed his own vocabulary. What Avray Wilson has done, wrote a critic in 1957, ‘is to reaffirm the reality of the geometric form. He has demonstrated that the liberated techniques of post-war are compatible with rigid form and compact structure.’
Twenty-six years ago, Adrian Mibus, director of Whitford Fine Art, London, asked Avray Wilson to write an essay to accompany a possible exhibition. Wilson’s artistic creative capacity was matched by a formidable mind and a talent for writing, and within a short time span he duly produced a thirty-three-page long typescript, a bite size introduction to his work, his thought process, his world. The exhibition coincides with the release of this previously unpublished essay by Frank Avray Wilson dated 1990.
Thus, Whitford Fine Art, “one of the 10 galleries to go to buy art”, according to The London Magazine, presents one of the most significant and creative one-man show in terms of British Abstract Expressionism in the capital.
“One should be able to be a Universe helping alchemist, or artist, in one’s ordinary living”.
Avray Wilson’s paintings can prove holistic as they aim to inspire the viewer to contemplation and meditation in order to position the human existence in Nature, Universe and Cosmos. However, for those who do not wish to choose the doctrine Avray Wilson is proposing, the paintings offer the experience of aesthetically wonderful and accomplished explosions of colour and form vigorously displayed and art historically firmly categorised as the European form of American Action Painting known as ‘Tachisme’.
Whitford Fine Art
6 Duke Street, St James’s
London
SW1Y 6BN
+44 (0)20 7930 9332591 0220
[email protected]
www.whitfordfineart.com