Press Release
Leyden Gallery
Present
Roxy Walsh
Two Tongues Tied
5th February – 8th March 2014 (Private View 4th Feb 18:30 – 21:00)
Roxy Walsh makes rich, luxuriant paintings in watercolour onto paper, panel and linen. Pigment is
soaked and washed, poured, set and stained into smooth, slow, absorbent surfaces. The women in
the paintings are intensely and sensuously coloured but frozen in attempts to gesture, to signal, to
mean: present yet inchoate.
‘Like bizarre hieroglyphs these figures never become characters in their own right, they don't appear
capable of thoughts or a rich internal life but neither do they stand for anything except themselves.
Rather this strange cast is grown out of paint and intuition…’ Dale McFarland, Felix Culpa, Article Press 2006
Inhabiting the surfaces of the paintings as words do, not yet sentences, these works posit painting as
an arena where different registers of expression can coexist and proliferate, from the expletive to
the absorbing, from the figurative or embodied to the formal and diagrammatic.
In her catalogue text, Walsh brings together other peoples’ words to allude to the elusive epiphanies
of broken sense. This text develops her interest in how fiction and visual art can inflect and infect
each other.
Roxy Walsh is an artist based in London, who also works collaboratively with Sally Underwood, most
recently in Dependent Rational Animals at Towner in Eastbourne (Review - Art Monthly, Sept 13,
George Vasey). Recent solo shows include Body Language at Galerie Peter Zimmermann, Mannheim
(2013) and The Lady Watercolourist at the Mac, Belfast (2012).
Capital (Closed) (2012) watercolour on panel
For further information and images contact
Leyden Gallery 9/9a Leyden Street London E1 7LE Tel: +44 (0)20 655 4825
www.leydengallery.com info@leydengallery.com
Press release
Leyden Gallery
Present Print Works by
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham
5th February – 8th March 2014 (Private view 4th February 18:30 – 21:00)
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s dual status as both a St Ives and Scottish artist has long been
acknowledged. It was also confirmed in a retrospective exhibition held in both Edinburgh and
Penzance in 1989. It was not however, until 2001, in the final decade of her life, that Barns-Graham
was at last to receive the accolade of a major monograph (published by Lund Humphries and written
by Lynne Green), which restores her to her central place in the history of modern art in Britain.
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham is held in major collections of art including the Tate.
In her last decade, while in her eighties, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004) produced an
astonishing number of prints. For Barns-Graham, making prints was a liberating experience, one in
which she could play with screens to create complete series of images. New ideas sprang constantly
from these variations.
Although Barns-Graham had made the occasional etching and linocut, it was screen prints made
with Kip Gresham (Curwen Studio) in 1991 that can be seen as the true start of her life as a
printmaker. In 1998, a significant turning point came with her introduction to Carol Robertson and
Robert Adam of Graal Press. On technique, Graal were able to offer her a more expansive range of
possibilities due to their ground-breaking development of water based screen printing inks. With
Barns-Graham’s individual brush marks captured on acetate, they made prints that are truly an
embodiment of the artist’s painting style. The first series made with Graal was Time. This was so
successful that she went on to collaborate with them on the editioning of major sets of images -
Millennium, Sunghrie, Earth - concluding with the White Circle, Wind Dance and Water Dance
(Porthmeor) series of 2002/3.
In this exhibition we are pleased to present some of the prints created at the Curwen Studio and a
group of prints made at the Graal Studio.
Quiet Time (1999) screen print
For further information and images contact
Leyden Gallery 9/9a Leyden Street London E1 7LE Tel: +44 (0)20 655 4825
www.leydengallery.com info@leydengallery.com