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.