William Crozier was educated at the Glasgow School of Art (1949-53). On graduating he spent time in Paris and Dublin before settling in London, where he quickly gained great notoriety for his work. By 1961 William Crozier was widely seen as one of the most exciting artists in London. Soho was his habitual haunt with fellow raconteurs William Irvine, Robert MacBryde, Robert Colquhoun, and intermittent comrades Francis Bacon, William Turnbull, and Eduardo Paolozzi. His first solo exhibition was in 1960 at the Drian Gallery, followed by another in 1961, and then three shows in consecutive years from 1962 at Arthur Tooth & Sons. In 1958, Crozier was lent a cottage in Essex and subsequently divided his time between there and London. For Crozier the bleak empty estuaries and the wilderness of the marshes of Essex was a ravaged landscape which symbolised the torment and fear of the post-war condition at the heart of existentialism. In the introduction to Crozier’s 1961 Drian show, G. M. Butcher wrote, “if there is one thing that Crozier wishes to get across in all his painting, it is a mood of fear, anxiety, unease. This is his personal reaction to the world as it is - where savagery is only just beneath the surface.”

Profoundly affected by post-war existential philosophy, Crozier consciously allied himself and his work with contemporary European art throughout the 1950s and 1960s, towards painters such as Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung and Nicolas de Staël. Extended stays in Paris in 1947, 1950, and 1953 were formational experiences: “To be in Paris then was to be at the centre of the world. Anyone who was not young in 1949 and who did not sit in the Café Flore or the Deux Maggots, where Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were as gods, simply cannot appreciate the sheer excitement that enveloped the young of Europe emotionally, physically and intellectually.” Conversely the Abstract Expressionism of the New York School provoked in Crozier no such enthusiasm: “I was disappointed, it seemed very provincial and inconsequential. I had heard that it was ‘large’, but this was just by current English standards. Think of Rubens or the Venetians.”

Crozier spent 1963 in southern Spain with the Irish poet Anthony Cronin, a stay that would prove pivotal to Crozier’s development as an artist due to both the landscape and culture. Crozier became fascinated by Spanish religious festivals such as 'Semana Santa' and 'Dia de los Muertos', which celebrated death with joyous and colourful carnival, and the Moorish roots of much Andalusian life including gypsy and flamenco dancing. The Andalusian landscape was constantly present in his works from the 1960s and beyond - the light and colours of Spain were an extraordinary revelation. Crozier described Spain as a nature “without mid-tones”: it was a land of extremes, of starkly bold colours, blinding light and deep shadows, not to mention immense heat. For Crozier, the passionate Andalusian temperament, at its most intoxicating in the eternally romantic figure of the matador, was a heady manifestation of environment.

Amongst Crozier’s most abstracted paintings, 'Enclosure End' captures the essence of the Andalusian spirit through absolute sensual delight in the application of paint. Painted in 1964 whilst Crozier was still living in Spain, 'Enclosure End' is the realisation of Crozier’s innate, deeply felt affinity with the landscape. Brimming with passion, 'Enclosure End' demands an all-encompassing reaction from the viewer, both psyche and body are brought into the aura of the painting. Bold, smooth swathes of sensuous dense black and peacock blue frame a swirling vortex of red, yellow, green, and white, whilst staccato strokes of blue and green cascade down the canvas. Tony Godfrey wrote that, “For Crozier the true experience of landscape cannot but partake of the primitivistic or atavistic – it is here in nature that we are most like animals again”. Crozier’s interest in origins, in the mystical and spiritual potency of the land, is decidedly modern in its conception. The primeval is transformed into a vital, transgressive visuality, a crudeness evident in much European abstraction, including the work of CoBrA founder Asger Jorn and proponents of Tachisme including Jean Dubuffet. For Crozier, the radical spirit of modernity resided in a landscape which elicited extreme emotion: “What can be more contemporary than experiencing something intensely?” Monumental and extraordinary, 'Enclosure
End' is Crozier at the peak of his visceral expressionistic prowess, distilling primitivism with the brutal rawness of modernity.