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

The Heong Gallery, surely the most overlooked space in the city of Cambridge, extends its growing reputation for the more occulded corners of visual expression with the little- explored phase of the artist Gillian Ayres. Central to the development of British art in the mid twentieth century the Heong’s presentation by Martin Gayford delves into a deeply painterly discovery of just how far her art sought to reach. As in the title Gillian Ayres declared she was “about what can be done with painting”- and in this show, her work goes beyond her 60s celebrity as an Abstract Expressionist and into the 70s

It is a much maligned and misunderstood decade, often carelessly dismissed as chaotic and unfocussed. But as a retrospective reveal, the decade became a manifestation or efflorescence of 60s ideas of freedom and artistic expression. Once that penny has dropped, devotees of this era become enchanted by its breadth and complexity – no wonder the University has its own High Priestess of 70s Amy Toibin, Professor of Modern and Contemporary art, whose latest shows explore some of the highpoints of that time” Gale Warning’ the latest.

For Gillian Ayres the 70s was about experimentation. Like the politics of the time, she expressed what painting could be all about.

Which in fact was expansive. Her paintings became enormous, hardly contained in any space or gallery. Martin Gayford presents them and some for the first time in full luxuriousness, expansive surprising works of remarkable imagination

“Gillian Ayres’s work of the 70s was exuberant, highly ambitious, highly original, yet is still largely unknown even by her greatest admirers.” He explains. A compelling reason to roam the Heong ,gallery ,not for the first time punching above its weight.