Six works by Gillian Ayres from the collection of Dame Shirley Conran: ‘A testament to their friendship’

A little-known fact about the British painter Gillian Ayres is that she was partly the model for Plum, the brilliant artist in Shirley Conran’s racy art-heist novel Tiger Eyes. The feisty Plum is in thrall to abstraction and longs to ‘ride bicycles through pools of paint, then over canvases stretched taut on the floor’.

Gillian Ayres met Shirley Conran at St Paul’s Girls’ School in London during the Second World War. Both were highly intelligent, fiercely independent and rebellious. Life can pull friends in different directions, and it certainly did for this formidable pair.

Ayres quit school at 16 to study fine art at Camberwell College of Arts. There she met Howard Hodgkin and fell in with a group of ex-servicemen, including Terry Frost and Adrian Heath, who were keen to make their mark on the art world. They were ambitious, anti-authoritarian and had a deep antipathy for the school’s prevailing realist aesthetic. These radical young painters came together in Victor Pasmore’s Saturday class, where they discussed line, colour and emotions. When Hans Namuth’s photographs of Jackson Pollock pouring paint on the floor were published, Ayres found her calling. By the early 1950s, she was a committed abstract modernist painter.

It is difficult to conceive of how hostile the British public was to the movement at the time. It took guts, or as Ayres would say, ‘sheer bloodymindedness’, to pursue something that was so deeply despised. There is a photograph of Ayres by Roger Mayne from 1960 that reveals a beautiful, wavy-haired young woman, jaw set with an indefatigable seriousness that hides her unruly exuberance.

Conran was equally single-minded. She began her career as a textile designer with her then husband, Terence Conran, before moving into journalism and founding Femail, the first women’s section of the Daily Mail. In 1977, she published Superwoman, her working feminist’s handbook for the home. Then, in 1982, came her sensational debut novel, Lace. It became a bestseller, and Conran used the money she earned from it to support the things she cared passionately about — most importantly, numeracy in education. ‘If you have no regrets, you haven’t taken any risks,’ she once said.

‘You can see why they were attracted to one another,’ says Conran’s son, Sebastian. ‘Both were prepared to go against prevailing trends. Gillian absolutely embodied the feminist ideals my mother promoted.’

On 23 October 2025, six works by Ayres from the estate of Dame Shirley Conran will be offered in the Modern British and Irish Art Day Sale. The artworks span three decades, from the 1980s to 2011. ‘Shirley Conran was one of Gillian Ayres’s biggest collectors — it is a real testament to their friendship,’ says Benedict Winter, director of Private and Iconic Collections at Christie’s.

Born in south-west London in 1930, Ayres first gained public attention in 1960, when she participated in Situation, an exhibition of abstract artists that also included Robyn Denny and Gordon House. This group of young painters and sculptors sought to challenge what they considered to be the ‘amateurism’ and ‘bohemianism’ of the London art scene. They took their lead from the smartly dressed American Abstract Expressionists, presenting themselves as serious and tough-minded.

Ayres was arguably the most ambitious of the group, laying huge boards on the floor and splattering them in shop-bought enamel paints. She was a very physical and lyrical advocate of the genre, using her hands to smear lines between pools of colour. Once asked about her visceral relationship with paint, she responded with an experimental poem: ‘…a shape — a relationship — a body — oddness — shock — mood — cramped — isolated — acid — sweet — encroaching — pivoting — fading — bruised…’

Her references were erudite and wide-ranging, from the Greek classics to Jacobean madrigals. ‘My mother never stopped talking about Gillian,’ says Sebastian. ‘She was wonderful company, and my mother absolutely understood where Gillian was coming from.’

What Ayres loved most about abstraction was its freedom. ‘There are no rules,’ she said, delighting in the intensity of emotion she could communicate through paint. In Anadyomene (1983), the impression is of a spilled cornucopia of dabs, dashes and repetitions that fall every which way, as if the artist had upended a table and allowed the viewer to crawl around in the wreckage.

That glorious sense of chaos is checked in Papagena (1983) by a forceful border, like a window onto another world, weightless and in flux. The paint flows and ricochets in a climatic battle of arcs and shudders. Everything in the work drives and engulfs you.

‘She made abstract paintings of a kind no one else quite made,’ says Winter. ‘There is tremendous vigour in her mark-making. It is generous and overflowing.’

In 1983, Ayres had a solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London, and Conran bought 15 of her artworks. In later life, when Conran decided to downsize, she sold off most of her art collection, keeping only her paintings by Ayres.

‘I think Shirley felt that had Gillian been a man, she would have had recognition much sooner,’ says Sebastian. ‘She’s easily up there with Barbara Hepworth and Bridget Riley. She considered her to be Britain’s foremost abstract painter.’

The Modern British and Irish Art Day Sale takes place on 23 October 2025, following the Modern British and Irish Art Evening Sale on 22 October. The sales will be on view 18-22 October at Christie’s in London

Related artists: Gillian Ayres