Driven to abstraction – Roxy Walsh and Wilhemina Barns-Graham prints

Detail from Just in Time by Wilhemina Barns-Graham. Courtesy of Leyden Gallery

Prints by one of the central figures in the story of British modern art are to be displayed alongside an exhibition of rich and luxuriant watercolours by London-based artist Roxy Walsh at the Leyden Gallery this month.

Wilhemina Barns-Graham, who died in 2004, produced significant work in her eighties during the last decade of her life. Having built a reputation as an abstract painter, from 1991 until her death started producing screen prints at a prolific rate. It was a creatively liberating period of her artistic life, and capturing her own brush marks on acetate led her to make prints that were an embodiment of her painting style.

In Roxy Walsh’s Two Tongues Tied exhibition, shown alongside the Barns-Graham prints, watercolours on various surfaces feature women who are intensely and sensuously coloured yet frozen in their attempts to make meaning, described by the artist as being “present yet inchoate”.

Roxy Walsh Two Tongues Tied and Wilhemina Barns-Graham Prints is at Leyden Gallery 9/9a Leyden Street, E1 7LE until 8 March.