Frank Avray Wilson (British 1914-2009)
Avray Wilson was the first painter in England to apply the techniques and methods of Action Painting and Tachism.
Having graduated from Cambridge University with a degree in Biology, Wilson moved to Paris in 1946. Back in London, Avray Wilson became a member of the progressive 'Free Painters Group', where he met the like-minded tachist-influenced painter Denis Bowen with whom he participated in the landmark Metavisual, Tachiste, Abstract exhibition at the Redfern Gallery, London in 1957. Together with Bowen, Avray Wilson founded the New Vision Centre Gallery, in Marble Arch, in 1956. For the next decade this avant-garde, subterranean gallery promoted hard-edge, lyrical and expressive forms of abstraction. Avray Wilson's need to balance free and explosive impulses with geometry and structure contrasted with Bowen's wilder informalism and found some kinship with the abstraction lyrique wing of contemporary continental painting. He met or exhibited with such leading figures as Hans Hartung, Alfred Manessier and Georges Mathieu in Paris during the early 1950s.
Avray Wilson's scientific background - he read biology at Cambridge during the mid 1930s - instilled an aesthetic necessity for structure and for what he called vitalist form. His philosophical interests went much further than following the pre-war tendency to link art and science, seeking and insisting on a transcendentalism to counter the atheist or materialist credo of the post-war existential age.
As a result, Avray Wilson's mysterious and ambivalent compositions, while carrying indistinct and residual motifs derived from nature - a figure, a landscape or a tilted still-life tabletop - also conveyed what the critic Cathy Courtney described in 1995 as 'something sensed but not fully seen'.
Avray Wilson himself commented on his scientific background:
studied biology hoping that it would provide me with an explanation of the wonder of life. But the claim that life was no more than a molecular mechanism, led me to join the ranks of 'vitalist' biologists, who recognised that life, like beauty, was a quality, not a thing. Artists do not usually need a justification for art. The power of art is convincing enough. But my scientific background obliged me to find an explanation of nature's art, which I felt sure would provide me with the firmest justification for human art.
Vitalism in biology implies a natural transcendental level, which is not material or spatial, the source of vitality. Here was also an explanation of nature's art, as the revelation of transcendental qualities in life and Nature. The artist's mind could be guided from the same source to create 'vitalistic' imageries.
aspiring to a vitalistic painting, biology had taught me the key importance of form in the expression of vitality. At profound molecular levels, vitally involved forms could be expressed in complex geometries, indicating that the visible 'organic' forms of life had a profound geometric basis.
Avray Wilson featured in many important group exhibitions, in particular at the British Arts Council, 'La Peinture Anglaise Contemporaine, 1957' Liège, Paris, Switzerland and also 'New Trends in British Painting' New York Foundation in Rome, 1958. He also showed at Leicester Galleries, the Royal Academy London, the Paris Salon, AIA in Paris and Brussels as well as numerous other international venues.
His publications include:
Art into Life, 1958
Art as Understanding, Foreword by Herbert Read, Routledge, 1963
Nature Regained, 1977
Art as Revelation, 1981Public collections include:
Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh
City Art Gallery, Manchester
City Art Gallery, Leeds
Cleveland Museum of Modern Art
Durham University
Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea
Leeds University
Leicester Museum and Art Gallery
The Southampton Art Gallery
The Toledo Art Gallery, Ohio
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
Bibliography
1961, Avray Wilson, exhibition catalogue, Redfern Gallery, London
Solo Exhibitions
1954, Obelisk Gallery, London
1956, Gallerie Helios Art, Brussels
1957, Gallerie Craven, Paris
1961, Avray Wilson, Redfern Gallery, London
1995, Redfern Gallery, London
2011, Paisnel Gallery, London
Group Exhibitions
1957, Metavisual, Tachiste, Abstract, Redfern Gallery, London; La Peinture Anglaise Contemporaine, British Council, Arts Council, Liege, Paris, Switzerland.
1958, New Trends in British Painting, New York Foundation in Rome; Survey of Contemporary British Painting, Howard Wise Gallery, USA
1959, John Moores Exhibition, Liverpool; Six Young Painters, The Arts Council
1961, Commonwealth Vision, The Commonwealth Institution
1986, Frank Avray Wilson, Warwick Arts Trust, Warwick
1988, Post War British Abstract Art, Austin / Desmond Fine Art, London.
2008, Post - War To Pop - Modern British Art: Abstraction, Pop and Op Art, Whitford Fine Art, London.