International Women’s Day Showcase With Amy Petra Woodward, Luey Graves and Nancy Milner
8th March 2023 – 16th April 2023
Biblio
The Trafalgar St. James
2 Spring Gardens
London
SW1A 2TS
For International Women’s Day 2023, The Trafalgar St. James hotel will showcase three Royal Academy artists in their subterranean arts and events space, Biblio. The exhibition will launch on 8th March and run through to 16th April 2023. The showcase will feature works from Amy Petra Woodward, Luey Graves and Nancy Milner.
The artists studied together at The Royal Academy Schools and will come together
for International Women’s Day to exhibit a selection of paintings. The artworks are available for purchase, with 25% of sales donated to NIA Ending Violence. The Trafalgar St. James is a luxury five-star hotel located on the edge of London’s Trafalgar Square; a sanctuary of style, rest and play in the heart of the capital. The exhibition will take place in Biblio, the hotel’s living room and a unique subterranean events space.
The artists: Amy Petra Woodward considers the role of investigation and a record of observation. A drawing outlines a space for pieces of colour – tones that remind her of settings, objects and a time of day, often nightfall. Preparatory drawings, both figurative and abstract, are often lifted from everyday life such as the human body, plants and effects of fire, air and water. Transposing a drawing into painting gives way to new meaning as the lines of an initial drawing are re-examined through careful overpainting.
Luey Graves is a London based artist, who studied at the Slade and the Royal Academy Schools. Her paintings feature female protagonists/archetypes, such as Mary or Artemis, in uncomfortable landscapes or situations; she considers her work a personal response to art history as a traditionally male dominated canon, through the specific lens of being female.
Nancy Milner‘s paintings contain space that is present and weighty as well as space that is more ephemeral, conveyed by the relationships of colour, line and touch. Compositions are arrived at through drawings, whilst colour is worked out through a slow process of building and layering. The finished works are an accumulation of the time taken to make them, a manifestation of thinking, memory and experience that have been made sense of in the space of painting.
©2023 Trafalgar St James, Amy Petra Woodward, Luey Graves, Nancy Milner