APURBA CHATTERJEE explains how British artists in India used the “picturesque” to reshape colonial landscapes and celebrate imperial power
A painter of paradox
CHRISTINE LINDEY is struck by the creative complexity of Aubrey Williams's enigmatic and powerfully realised paintings
Aubrey Williams's Symphony
PAUL DONOVAN welcomes a revival of Reginald Rose’s classic play that reminds us of the fundamental need for trials with juries
SIMON PARSONS applauds an exceptional performance of Wesker’s little-known play, by the same actor for whom it was written 45 years ago
ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review Late Fame, The Death of Robin Hood, Leviticus, and Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass
ANGUS REID recommends a uniquely accomplished documentary collage that contemplates our relation to the natural world
GORDON PARSONS enjoys Kant’s ‘mind-boggling’ theory of human reality: that we create the reality we experience
WHEN Aubrey Williams (1926-1990) arrived in London in 1952 to further his art education, he immersed himself in the contemporary Western art that he had only seen in reproduction in his native Guyana.
By the mid-1950s, like so many others, he fell under the spell of American abstract expressionism, then being promoted covertly by the CIA as the freest and most “advanced” form of expression. But a lifelong refusal to be aesthetically boxed in prompted him to also continue painting figuratively and sometimes to blur the boundaries between the two.
Similar stories
APURBA CHATTERJEE explains how British artists in India used the “picturesque” to reshape colonial landscapes and celebrate imperial power
SIMON DUFF is thrilled by a visceral, no-holds-barred exploration of the expressive powers of raw material
MIRANDA RICHMOND relishes the gloriously liberated art of Roy Oxlade, and traces his method back to the thinking of David Bomberg, his acknowledged teacher
JOHN GREEN welcomes a remarkable study of Mozambique’s most renowned contemporary artist