Feasts of colour

Gillian Ayres at 80
Alan Cristea Gallery, 31 & 34 Cork Street, W1, until 13 March

Claude Monet
Helly Nahmad Gallery, 2 Cork Street, W1, until 26 February

Birthday greetings are in order for Gillian Ayres, who has just celebrated her 80th with an exhibition of new work of undiminished vigour, inventiveness and sheer uplift. One of our leading abstract artists, Ayres manages to keep on surprising us with large-scale paintings of superabundant vitality despite her own poor health, and with images of pronounced joy. However, her work is not all high spirits. The celebration of colour which distinguishes it is made with the full and certain knowledge of personal extinction (though may that moment be long delayed). Her work shines with more depth for being produced in this context, like the Pole star in the night sky. Here is no indulgent self-expression but an inquiry after basic truths that will illuminate the human condition and with luck make life more bearable.

Although Ayres is an abstract painter, this does not mean that she lives in some rarefied ivory tower, unaware of the world around her. She has spent a lifetime looking, and the intense quality of her visual attention (a characteristic of all true artists) has fed back directly or indirectly into her art. The shapes in her most recent paintings have assumed more clearly defined edges — in some cases to the point of becoming geometrical — and are even beginning to look like recognisable things in the phenomenal world. If in her earlier work it was the relationships between things she had seen that filtered back into her paintings, now the actual things are appearing, though the overall impulse of her painting remains resolutely abstract. Thus we might discern triangles, circle-segments, fingers or pods of colour, kites, leaves or palm trees.