STEVE ANDREW enjoys an account of the many communities that flourished independently of and in resistance to the empires of old
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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
TOM STONE urges you to catch the last dates of a New York singer/songwriter, never afraid to challenge her audiences musically or politically
JAN WOOLF examines work that aims to give viewers a material experience of the environments in the polar north and Britain equally affected by the climate crisis
The bard recalls advice received 50 years ago from his TRB muse, and sorts out appropriate legislation for football club ownership
MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE review Facing War, Kontinental ’25, Bugonia, and Relay
MAYER WAKEFIELD is frustrated by a production of Ibsen’s classic study of an anti-heroine that fails to elucidate her motivations
PETER MASON tunes his ear into the domestic affairs of a Carribbean couple with a troublesome son
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.
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