Gillian Ayres valuation
Painted bold, joyful abstractions in thick, saturated colour, from the drip paintings of the 1950s to the late Cornish canvases.
Gillian Ayres was born in Barnes in 1930 and studied at Camberwell School of Art from 1946 to 1950, having been accepted by the Slade at sixteen but found too young to enrol.
What a work by Gillian Ayres is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
Gillian Ayres was born in Barnes in 1930 and studied at Camberwell School of Art from 1946 to 1950, having been accepted by the Slade at sixteen but found too young to enrol. Through the 1950s she worked part time at the AIA Gallery in Soho and was among the first British painters to take up the poured and dripped techniques of American Abstract Expressionism. She taught at Bath Academy of Art at Corsham from 1959 to 1965 and at Saint Martin's from 1965 to 1978, and in 1978 became head of painting at Winchester School of Art, the first woman in Britain to hold such a post. In 1981 she left teaching to paint full time, first in North Wales and from 1987 at Morwenstow, on the border of Devon and Cornwall, where her canvases grew thicker, brighter and more patterned. She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989, was a Royal Academician, and died in 2018.
Ayres was a prolific printmaker, and her woodcuts, carborundum prints and etchings come up often, alongside paintings of every period. Her dealer for her last twenty years was the Alan Cristea Gallery, and a provenance through it or her earlier galleries is usual.
Camberwell, Corsham and Morwenstow
One of her first projects was a commission in 1957 to decorate the dining hall of South Hampstead High School.
She was runner-up for the John Moores Painting Prize in 1982, and the Royal Academy showed her work in 1997.
South Hampstead, Thumbprint and the Momart fire
The South Hampstead murals of 1957, which have been called the only true British contribution to American Abstract Expressionism, were soon papered over and rediscovered in 1983 in nearly perfect condition. Her early paintings are in thin vinyl paint and a few colours; after the move to Wales the oils became thick and exuberant, with titles such as A Midsummer Night and Gyre and Gimble given once a painting was finished.
She made prints with Jack Shirreff in Wiltshire and later with Peter Kosowicz at Thumbprint Editions in London, and her first print project with the Alan Cristea Gallery, three etchings, came in 1998. Fourteen of her works were destroyed in the Momart warehouse fire in east London in 2004, and the Whitechapel included her in Action, Gesture, Paint, its survey of women abstract painters, in 2023.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
