Eco Cataclysm

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Downing Street

Guyana-born artist Aubrey Williams settled initially in London in the 1950s and then began working mostly from studios in Jamaica and Florida. He developed an abstract painterly language in conversation with the American abstractionism of his time and mined a wide spectrum of visual and cultural references for his work. These ranged from pre-Columbian glyphs and motifs – as he sought to convey ideas from a pre-modern era in a modernist visual format; to the scientific drawings of cells, which these shapes often resonated with; and on his deep familiarity, as a trained agronomist, with the Guyanese and Caribbean landscape. Prior to the 1980s when 'Eco-cataclysm' was painted, he had a strong sense of the looming ecological crisis that we are now all too familiar with, which he explored in his work. Art historian Kobena Mercer states that his work was ‘highly suggestive of an immersive relationship to land, soil and a place of belonging, while also evoking the traces or remains left behind by the aftermath of a cataclysmic event’. In this painting, Eco-cataclysm we see the soil of the land in the foreground, a calm blue sky or perhaps even the sea in the background and a disturbing configuration of red shapes, superimposed on both. The traces of green foliage we see overlaid on this conflagration of red bring to mind the words of playwright Jan Carew who wrote on Williams’ work and its engagement with the indigenous vernacular culture that is almost lost in the Caribbean: ‘The Indians say that when the green skin of the living world is peeled off, then the earth becomes a coffin for the dead.’

Born in the then British colony of Guyana, Aubrey Williams began painting at an early age, taking lessons from a restorer of religious paintings in Guyanese Churches before the age of 12. He trained later as an agronomist and arrived in Britain in 1952 for an Agricultural Engineering course at Leicester University. He travelled around Europe before settling in London and attending St Martins College of Art in 1954. He was an active participant in London's art world exhibiting work at the New Vision Centre Gallery and winning the only prize at the First Commonwealth Biennale of Abstract Art. In the 1960s, as attitudes to immigrants became more hostile and racism in Britain gained ground, he found himself increasingly marginalised and began to work mostly from Jamaica and Florida in the US. He exhibited in a solo show at the Commonwealth Institute of Art in London in 1981 but it wasn't till after his death in 1990 that his work received the critical attention that it was due. Exhibitions of his work have been held most recently at Tate Britain (2023-4); Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada; Glasgow Museums, Scotland; Barbican Art Gallery, London (all 2022); Somerset House (2021); Perez Museum, Miami, US (2021).

Places

Subjects

Materials & Techniques

Artist

Aubrey Williams (1926 - 1990)

Title

Eco Cataclysm

Date

1989

Medium

Acrylic on paper

Dimensions

height: 69cm; width: 82cm; depth: 2.5cm

Acquisition

Purchased from October Gallery, September 2023

Provenance

October Gallery, London UK; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 11 September 2023

GAC number

19196