Leyden Gallery present Roxy Walsh: Two Tongues Tied & Print Works by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

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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 for the show, 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 2013, George Vasey). Recent solo shows include Body Language at Galerie Peter Zimmermann, Mannheim (2013) and The Lady Watercolourist at the Mac, Belfast (2012). Alongside this major exhibition of paintings by Roxy Walsh Leyden Gallery are delighted to present Print Works by the esteemed artist 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.