MASTER DRAWINGS

1974 – 1979

PRIVATE VIEW: Thursday 17th September 6-8pm
The exhibition continues until Saturday 3rd October

This exhibition of Evelyn Willams’ drawings follows our 2008 exhibition of her paintings. It has been organised in collaboration with the Evelyn Williams Trust who are responsible for the care of Williams’ work but who also have a mandate to promote the Arts more generally. Their charitable work includes an annual ‘Evelyn Williams Drawing Award’, given as part of the renowned Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize.

EVELYN WILLIAMS (1929-2012)

Evelyn (Evie) Williams (1929–2012) was one of Britain’s most singular post-war artists, producing an extraordinary body of paintings, drawings and sculptures that explore vulnerability, endurance and the emotional complexities of the human condition. Her work draws on mythology, religion, medieval imagery and deeply personal experiences to create a visual language that is symbolic and psychological.

The emotional intensity of Williams’ work is inseparable from her childhood. Born in London, she was the second daughter of Jenny Williams, an opera singer, and Brendan Williams, a radical writer. Jenny had hoped for a son, and Evelyn’s difficult birth contributed to their strained relationship. From an early age, Evelyn was cared for by a local girl while Jenny pursued her singing career.

At the age of two and a half she was sent to Summerhill School, A. S. Neill’s experimental boarding school. While Summerhill’s progressive philosophy championed children’s freedom, equality and self-determination, its refusal to recognise the dependency of very young children left Williams with a profound sense of abandonment. She later recalled the experience as one of lasting loss, attending few classes and remaining largely silent until the age of four.

Williams entered St Martin’s School of Art in 1944 at the age of fifteen before studying at the Royal College of Art from 1947 to 1950, where she graduated with a First-Class Diploma and the E. Q. Henriques Prize for Drawing. Her painting Sick Child attracted widespread attention after surpassing works by established artists including Augustus John and Jacob Epstein in The Observer‘s exhibition of child portraits.  From this, commissions for child portraits followed, including from the Rothschild family. However, Williams soon abandoned portraiture in favour of more personal and experimental three-dimensional works.  She made reliefs in papier-mâché, and then turned to clay before moving on to wax and a modelling material sourced from Florence. 

Williams forged an independent career at a time when the British art world was male-dominated. She disrupted expectations by winning the John Moores Sculpture Prize in 1961 with a papier-mâché work entered as a collage. A retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1973 confirmed her reputation, although critics often struggled to situate work. Throughout her career, Williams repeatedly expanded both the scale and ambition of her practice. Monumental reliefs shown at Riverside Studios in 1984 culminated in All Night Through (1984), now housed at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, whose production permanently damaged her back. During the 1990s she had major exhibitions at the Graves Gallery, the Mead Gallery and Manchester Art Gallery.

Williams’ work has often been understood in relation to the sublime. Rather than the traditional idea of awe inspired by nature or the divine, her work locates the sublime within human experience. Her figures confront suffering, vulnerability and transformation, yet are equally defined by resilience, compassion and hope. Drawing on her own experiences of loss and emotional sensitivity, her drawings explore the complexities of what it means to be human. 

“There is an uncertain land between what we call the real world and the other one, where we go to sleep. It’s a place where dangers hide seductively, where one could be struck forever”.

(Evelyn Williams)

Below is a selection of works that will be included in the exhibition