Adrian Heath was born in Mamyo, Burma, in 1920 . He lived, until 1936, in a country house filled, appropriately, with paintings and engravings by the likes of Gainsborough, Romney and Leighton. In 1938, as a private pupil of Stanhope Forbes, he began producing elegant Academy-style nudes. During the war, in a POW camp, he discovered Emmons’ book on Sickert and subsequent study at the Slade School of Fine Art (1945 – 1947) encouraged the depiction of modern life. But greater exposure to modern painting (Matisse and Picasso at the V & A in 1946; the discovery of Villon in 1947) and friendship with Pasmore developed in him interest in abstraction, an interest that led to Heath’s Fifties paintings with their indebtedness to geometry, golden sections and root rectangles. In 1949 and 1951 he visited St Ives, where he met Ben Nicholson , and he formed a link between the St Ives School and London-based Constructivists such as Victor Pasmore and Kenneth and Mary Martin . During the early 1950s he was a significant figure in promoting abstract art--by organizing collective exhibitions at his London studio (at 22 Fitzroy Street) in 1951, 1952, and 1953, and by writing a short popular book on the subject, Abstract Painting: Its Origin and Meaning (1953), which begins with the sentence: 'There seems to be little understanding of the values of abstract painting and consequently no general appreciation of its qualities.' The exhibitions helped to inspire Lawrence Alloway 's book Nine Abstract Artists (1954). Heath's paintings of this time featured large, block-like slabs of colour, heavily brushed. He also made a few constructions. Later his paintings became freer and more dynamic.

The strongest paintings achieve something remarkable. Their roots may be in the visible, experienced world, but they combine a sense of presence with one of absence. Often concentrated around a central form, they frequently leave it unresolved, as though the subject had just left, but not before animating the surrounding space. Heath, in his Fifties abstractions, appeared to work his way inwards from the extremities of the canvas but these new paintings suggest the reverse. Their energy comes from a central, dramatically elusive, presence. Furthermore, through a sophisticated synthesis of the visible and the visual, the rooted and the constructed, Heath reconciles his twin interests to produce paintings that are, at best, metaphoric rather than literal. Adrain Heath continued to paint into his seventies. His last exhibition, a retrospective to commemorate his 70 th birthday was a combined effort by Austin/Desmond and the Redfern Gallery. He died in 1992 in France.