Frank Avray Wilson was an early 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, Avray 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.

Avray Wilson's paintings are present in the following museums: British Museum, London; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, USA; Cleveland Museum of Modern Art, Ohio, USA; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester; Northampton Museum and Art Gallery, Northampton; Southampton City Art Gallery, Southampton; Toledo Art Gallery, Ohio, USA; Victoria and Albert Museum, London.