Gillian Ayres

Biography

One of the great British abstract artists of the 20th century, Gillian Ayres discovered her vocation at the age of 14, teaching art to the children of Stepney during the Blitz. She enrolled at Camberwell College of Art at 16, beginning an influential career as a painter, printmaker, gallerist and teacher that earned her a Turner Prize nomination, an OBE, a CBE and an election to the Royal Academy. She died in 2018 leaving behind an exceptional and highly individual body of work, bearing traces of both European post-war abstraction and American Expressionism.