Frank Avray Wilson was an early post-war Abstract Expressionist painter and a leading force of British Abstraction. In 1953 he became part of the 'Free Painters Group', where he met Denis Bowen with whom he ran the legendary New Vision Gallery, a showcase for Abstract Expressionism and Tachism in Britain. In the mid 1950s, Avrey Wilson rebelled against the abuses of Action Painting. Instead he sought to reaffirm the reality of geometric form. His paintings demonstrate that the liberated techniques of post-war art are compatible with rigid form and compact structure. Avray Wilson's scientific background instilled an aesthetic necessity for structure and for what he himself called 'vitalist' form. His philosophical interests went much further than following the pre-war tendency to link art and science, seeking and insisting on a transcendentalism to counter the atheist or materialist credo of the post-war existential age.
Wilson's work is included in the following museums: Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh
City Art Gallery, Manchester
City Art Gallery, Leeds
Cleveland Museum of Modern Art
Leicester Museum and Art Gallery
The Southampton Art Gallery
The Toledo Art Gallery, Ohio
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.