What can be done with painting: Gillian Ayres in the '70s

6 June - 24 August 2025

Wednesday - Sunday / 12pm-5pm

Free admission

What can be done with painting: Gillian Ayres in the ‘70s at the Heong Gallery at Downing College, Cambridge, reveals an overlooked period in the career of a major British painter. Gillian Ayres (1930–2018) played a key role in the development of post-war British abstract art, and is celebrated for her bold colours and expressive, gestural forms. She believed that her art was, above all, “about what can be done with painting”.

The least-explored era of Ayres’s artistic life is the 1970s, a mid-career point of transition from her early phases to her later work. In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s she might reasonably have been described as an Abstract Expressionist, perhaps the most original and powerful British exponent of the idiom. From the early ‘80s until the end of her life she enjoyed considerable acclaim, including one-women shows at the Serpentine Gallery and the Royal Academy. But for
her, the 70s was a decade of experimentation, during which her work changed radically and she produced a series of extraordinary, often monumental paintings.

The exhibition at the Heong Gallery, curated by the writer, critic and curator Martin Gayford, reveals this less-explored period of her career, bringing together a selection of works that have seldom, and in some cases never,been seen in public before.

The first half of the decade was an era in which both Ayres, and painting itself, fell out of fashion. She reacted by indulging in the medium abundantly and luxuriously: masses of paint, canvas by the yard. Some pictures were so long that they had to be painted in the garden. Here were paintings far bigger than any canvas that could be accommodated on an easel; not windows on the world – more like worlds in themselves. What can be done with painting displays several of these works, including a vast canvas that has never been previously exhibited. Other works from Untitled (purples), 1971. Acrylic on canvas. 260.5 x 738 cm. Cristea Roberts Gallery, photograph © Joss Young later in the decade represent an extreme of painterliness. The hallmark of Ayres’s style of the late ‘70s, wrote her friend the critic and curator Tim Hilton, was “a great quantity of paint – a quantity almost too weighty for the host paper or canvas”.

Gayford explains: “Gillian Ayres’s work of the 70s was exuberant, highly ambitious, highly original, yet is still largely unknown even by her greatest admirers.”

About Gillian Ayres

Gillian Ayres studied at the Camberwell School of Art in London from 1946 to 1950. She taught at St Martin’s School of Art, London from 1965 to 1978 and in 1978 became Head of Painting at Winchester School of Art where she remained until 1981. Ayres first exhibited in Young Contemporaries in 1949, and with the London Group in 1951. Her first solo exhibition was at Gallery One, London in 1956. Since then, she has had exhibitions of her work throughout Europe and beyond, most recently in China. She won numerous awards for her painting, and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989. Ayres was awarded an OBE in 1986 and elected as a Royal Academician in 1991.

About Martin Gayford

Martin Gayford is a writer, critic and curator. He is the author of books on Michelangelo, John Constable, Vincent Van Gogh, Lucian Freud, David Hockney and Gillian Ayres.

With thanks to Southern & Partners, and Jim and Sam Mundy.