Gillian Ayres (1930 - 2018)

Oil on board
75 x 55 cm
Signed

Provenance
Galeria Alvarez, Portugal
Jaime Isidoro, Portugal


In 1976, sponsored by the British Council, Gillian Ayres exhibited a group of new paintings at Galeria Alvarez in Portugal.

This group of pictures precipitated a move away from the works of the 60s. It was a decade in which many of the paintings were closely related in both imagery and technique: intense colour, dredged with thickly layered paint dominated the work from this period. Gone were the more spacious paintings from the previous decade. In their stead came slicks of paint smeared onto the canvas/board, layer upon layer, dense with impasto adding texture and depth. This untitled painting from the mid-1970s, exhibited at Galeria Alvarez, is one such example amongst a decade of works demonstrating Ayres’s continued search to communicate and express a language through paint.

“The following seems to me inseparable – line, shape, chosen colour, intensity, weight, tone, structure and composition. Content, area and materials chosen are the questionable limits of painting – which of course is finally unrestrained”. Gillian Ayres, 1976

Excerpt from the statement written by Ayres for her exhibition in Portugal.