Twenty of the artists represented in the exhibition arrived in the UK from India, Pakistan, Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Ghana, Sudan, Algeria, South Africa and the Caribbean, countries which had connections to Britain through their colonial histories. These artists were to play a significant role in the evolution of modern British art and culture. The selection of artists on show at Crossing Borders is a small sample gathered from British Art Fair exhibitors and associates. The post-war artists discussed here came to Britain through a variety of means and embraced, and contributed to, the developing gallery scene. 

Charlie Phillips, One of the first Notting Hill 'street' Carnivals in 1968. Courtesy of Centre for British Photography. 

India and Pakistan

Following India’s independence in 1947, Indian artists began arriving in the UK. The first represented in Crossing Borders is Francis Newton Souza. Expelled from art school for supporting Mahatma Gandhi's Quit India movement, Souza became a founding member of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group, which reacted against traditional Indian art styles. But the hostile reception he received led him to emigrate to London in 1949, where he pursued a vigorous, expressionist style of figurative painting. His most famous series, figurative works painted black on black with figures visible in the brush strokes was made in London during the 1950s and 1960s when he showed and sold at Victor Musgrave’s Gallery One, increasingly recognised as a home to progressive artists of the day. Here, his work was admired by critics such as Edwin Mullins, the poet Stephen Spender, and not least, the artist Francis Bacon who became a friend. In 1989 he was included in the seminal Hayward Gallery show, The Other Story: Afro-Asian artists in post-war Britain, which was curated by the Pakistan-born artist Rasheed Araeen, highlighting the work of racially and aesthetically marginalised artists. Since his death in India in 2002, Souza’s work has been in high demand in the auction rooms reaching £1 million and more on several occasions.

In 1950, a year after Souza emigrated to Britain, his half-brother, Lancelot Ribeiro arrived in London as a teenager to study accountancy and drawing. After briefly returning to India, he then came back to the UK in 1962 to work as Souza’s studio assistant and pursue his own art career, which resulted in several exhibitions held at institutions such as the Abbot Hall Art Gallery and Camden Art Centre in the 1970s and 1980s. 

Also arriving in the UK in the 1950s was the Pakistani artist Anwar Shemza, who came to London in 1956 on a British Council scholarship to study at the Slade School of Art. He found that his professor, the renowned art historian E.H. Gombrich, regarded Islamic art as purely functional and therefore considered it inferior. Shemza sought inspiration instead in the Islamic rooms of the British Museum and Victoria & Albert Museum, from which he developed his own fusion of Islamic and modern western art, identifying as an ‘Asian diaspora’ artist influenced to a degree by Paul Klee. In the 1960s Shemza exhibited mainly at the outward-looking New Vision and Gallery One galleries. In 1989, four years after his death, he was included, like Souza, in The Other Story. Shemza is currently the subject of a display at the British Museum until 9 October 2023. Of it, the British Museum Magazine writes ‘it is a reminder of the role of South Asian artists in British art history and the incalculable impact of migration on British art and culture up to the present day.’ 

Avinash Chandra (1931-1991)

Church on University Road, Belfast, 1960

Oil on board81 x 61 cm

Courtesy Osborne Samuel. 

Then from India came Sadanand Bakre and Avinash Chandra. Chandra had received a scholarship from St Martin’s School of Art and in 1962 featured in a BBC Monitor documentary. When the tenor Peter Pears bought one of his works, his fame spread far and wide through mass media coverage. In 1965 he became the first British artist of Indian heritage to exhibit at Tate Britain (then Tate Gallery) and in 1989 he too was included in The Other Story. Sadly he died two years later. In 2018 Chandra was remembered in another BBC film, Whoever Heard of a Black Artist? Britain’s Hidden Art History, which testified to the new wave of interest in artists of colour that has characterised the art world in recent years. 

One of the last of this group to arrive in the UK from South Asia, in 1964, was Pakistani artist, exhibition curator and activist, Rasheed Araeen. Araeen trained as an engineer and was a self-taught artist, who possibly became the most influential of all Pakistani diaspora artists in the UK, supporting artists of African, Latin American and Asian heritage, and becoming the founder of the radical magazine Third Text. A major exhibition of Araeen’s work was held in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall this year with an interactive version of his most significant early work, Zero to Infinity (1968-2007). A smaller, related work in wood (4rS, 1970-2016), is shown at Crossing Borders.

A year later, 25-year-old Balraj Khanna came from India to read English Literature but taught himself to paint instead, staging a one-man show at Denis Bowen’s New Vision Group Gallery in 1965. Khanna was sufficiently established by 1979 to be granted a solo show at the Serpentine Gallery and in 1989 was included in the Hayward Gallery’s The Other Story. 

Balraj Khanna (b. 1940)

Mask, 2004.

Acrylic and sand on canvas 60X 50 cm.

Courtesy of Osbourne Samuel

Singapore

Born in Singapore (then a part of British Malaya) of Chinese descent in 1936, Kim Lim came to London in 1954. She studied at St Martin’s School of Art and then the Slade School of Art where she was unhappy with the way art history was taught, from the Italian primitives to the Renaissance. In 1960, the year she graduated, Lim developed a more minimalist style in her sculpture - at first using industrial materials, steel, wood and glass and later, stone, simultaneously producing a distinctive line in printmaking. She married the sculptor William Turnbull, and in 1977 she was the only woman and non-white artist to be represented in the first Hayward Annual Exhibition. But, not wanting to be seen as ’other’, she turned down an invitation to take part in Rasheed Araeen’s The Other Story exhibition in 1989. 

Since her death in 1997 Lim has been the subject of reappraisal with solo exhibitions at the Camden Arts Centre in 1999 and a spotlight display at Tate Britain in 2020. On the latter occasion, Tate curator Elena Crippa commented: ‘She was Singaporean and a woman at a time when the art world in Britain was afflicted by systemic racism and sexism.’ The Tate Britain show, she said, was part of a larger institutional effort to ‘conceive of new narratives that present the history of British art as marked by reciprocal connections and influences across different regions, nations, cultures, and social classes.’ 

The Caribbean

Significant Caribbean artists moved to Britain in the 1940s and 1950s as part of what has been called ‘The Windrush Generation’, named after the arrival of HMT Empire Windrush in 1948 (the 75th anniversary is being celebrated this year). Many of these artists suffered institutional racism and their work was barely recognised until recently.

Crossing Borders is delighted to showcase the talents of Guyanese abstract expressionist Aubrey Williams who came to the UK in 1952, studying agriculture first and then art at St Martin’s School of Art. In the 1960s he found his way to Denis Bowen’s trailblazing New Vision Centre Gallery and became a founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement. Represented since 1984 by London’s October Gallery, Williams has been (belatedly) honoured with a room display at Tate Britain, open until June 2024.

Artists also arriving in the 1950s included: Tam Joseph, who came from Dominica in 1955 and worked on the animated Beatles film, Yellow Submarine; Paul Dash from Barbados; and John Lyons from Trinidad, who studied at Goldsmiths College, spent a lifetime teaching, and won the Arts Council Windrush Arts Achievement Award in 2003. All three were represented in Tate’s Caribbean-British Art show, Life Between Islands, in 2021. As that exhibition’s curator, David A. Bailey, wrote of the latter three artists, their work explores ‘the spiritual legacies of slavery in Africa and the New World in the form of ritual music, dance and artefacts, as well as the context of urbanisation, with works that reference issues such as policing, education and institutionalised discrimination.’

Capturing it all at the time on camera was Jamaican photographer Charlie Phillips who travelled to London aged twelve in 1956, acquired a Kodak Brownie camera and never looked back. Taking a slightly different route was Jamaican Cleveland Brown who came to Britain as a carpenter in 1961, worked as a porter at Sotheby’s, and started painting in 1973, putting his newly acquired skill to use in the celebration of Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee in 1977 which is included in the exhibition. 

Tam Joseph (b.1947)

Spirit of Carnival, 1988

Silkscreen print, 77 x 103 cm

© Tam Joseph. Courtesy of Felix & Spear. 

Ghana, Sudan, Algeria and South Africa

One of the many artists who migrated to Britain in the 1950s from the African continent was the Ghanaian photographer James Barnor who had acquired his first camera, a Kodak Brownie, aged 17 in 1946, and developed a lucrative career in studio portraiture. In 1957, Ghana achieved independence from the British empire. Two years later Barnor arrived in the UK and stayed for a decade documenting Africans in Britain and doing fashion shoots with black models. On his return to Ghana, he worked on developing the use of colour for which he achieved some notoriety. But it was not until after he returned to Britain in 1994 that he achieved true recognition, staging popular exhibitions, in 2010 at London’s Institute of International Visual Arts (INIVA), an arts organisation dedicated to radical contemporary artistic practice from African, Asian and Caribbean diaspora perspectives and, in 2021 at the Serpentine Gallery.

Another was Ibrahim El-Salahi who left his native Sudan in 1954 aged 24 to study at the Slade School of Art in London. After returning to Sudan he was imprisoned in 1975 for his politics but released in 1978, when he left for Doha and then Oxford in the late 1990s where he still lives. In 2013 he was the subject of Tate Modern’s first retrospective of a British-African artist. 

Also heading to the UK to study was Algerian born Houria Niati who arrived at Croydon College of Art in 1977 aged 29. Niati was included in the now historic Five Black Women exhibition at London’s Africa Centre in 1985 along with future art stars Sonia Boyce and Lubaina Himid and will be included in Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt show which opens in November 2023. 

White South Africans were also in the mix of artists arriving in the UK during this period. Leaving South Africa penniless in 1957, and painting in the latest abstract-cum-tachiste-style was Douglas Portway. Portway was living in Ibiza in 1959 when he signed up with the forward-looking Drian Galleries in London, run by Polish-born refugee artist, Halima Nalecz. In 1967 he settled in St Ives, where he and several other artists had adopted Zen Buddhism and exhibited with the astute London gallerist Marjorie Parr. He died in France in 1993. 

A much earlier South African immigrant was Denis Bowen. Orphaned at birth in 1921 he was sent to the UK as a child to live with relatives. After studying at the Royal College of Art, he embarked on a 40-year teaching career also founding the New Vision Group in 1951 and New Vision Centre Gallery in 1955 where he supported Black and Asian artists such as Aubrey Williams and Balraj Khanna. While the gallery did not gain widespread acceptance during its lifetime (it closed in 1966) it has subsequently been recognised as a significant platform in the evolution of advanced, multi-cultural activity in Britain. Bowen’s own art, which moved from fashionable tachisme to more psychedelic cosmological subjects, is still being reassessed. 

Houria Niati (b.1948)

Mother and I, 2006

Print on canvas.

© Houria Niati, Courtesy of Felix & Spear 

Australia and New Zealand

On show in Crossing Borders are drawings by one of Australia’s most famous artists, Sidney Nolan who became another fifties immigrant, moving to London in 1951, and later Herefordshire, living in the UK until his death in London in 1992. 

Crossing Borders is showing work by one of New Zealand’s most significant female artists, Frances Hodgkins (1869-1947) who left her country of birth in 1901 for Europe and art school in London. London and Paris becoming the twin axes of her cultural travels. In 1929 she became a member of the UK’s Seven and Five Society, along with Ben and Winifred Nicholson and Christopher Wood, and became one of Britain’s leading modern women artists. In the 1930s she worked from a studio by Corfe Castle in Dorset where the work on show, Still Life Study c 1930 was painted. 

Sir Sidney Nolan, OM RA (1917-1992)

The Art of War.

Felt pen, 25.5 x 30.5 cm

Courtesy of Whitford Fine Art

Artists who came to live and work in Britain from all over the world during the 20th century and contributed significantly to its culture, are the subject of a wide-ranging exhibition, Crossing Borders: Internationalism in Modern British Art, at British Art Fair 2023. Artworks from immigrants to the UK from India and Pakistan, Central and Eastern Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, Australia and New Zealand, and America will all be on display. Works are being supplied by past and present exhibitors of the fair and will be for sale with prices ranging from four to six figures. The exhibition is being co-curated by Colin Gleadell, who is on the fair’s advisory committee, and art historian and author Monica Bohm-Duchen, founding director of the Insiders/Outsiders project.