- Venue
- The Muse Gallery
- Starts
- Thursday, May 1, 2025
- Ends
- Sunday, May 25, 2025
- Address
- 269 Portobello Road, W11 1LR
- Location
- London
- Organiser
- The Muse Gallery
Margaret Ashman
Margaret Ashman was born in 1959 in Northampton, England. With a Physics degree from Oxford University and after several years working as a research Physicist she retrained in Fine Art at the University of Hertfordshire and did a Masters in Printmaking at the University of Brighton in 2005.
Recent solo shows include
A time to Measure: Happenstance Gallery 2023
New Prints: Impact Printmaking Conference 2022
Breaking Bread: Swiss Church London 2022
Higher Ground: Muse Gallery 2019
She is an elected Senior Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers and exhibits regularly at the Bankside Gallery. She also exhibits regularly in many national exhibitions, art fairs and galleries including the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the Woolwich Print Fair, PrintFest and the Great Print Exhibition.
She has exhibited in various International Print Biennials including Guanlan, Liège, Penang, Qijiang, Lingshi, and Douro. My work was selected for the Kraków-Katowice Triennial in 2009, the 5th Beijing International Art Biennale in 2012 and the 3rd Shanghai International Printmaking Exhibition in 2014. She was included in the prestigious Light Matter: Art at the Intersection of Photography and Printmaking exhibition in Indiana and Alberta Canada in 2019.
In 2015 She was commissioned by the Arts Council UK to make a series of photo etched portraits and a sign dance self portrait film for the exhibition Shifting Subjects: Contemporary Women Telling the Self through the Contemporary Arts, at the Abbey Walk Gallery, UK. A film about the exhibition is permanently installed in the Usher Gallery Lincoln.
Danuta Solowiej
Danuta Solowiej is a London based artist. She was born in Bialystok, the town near the primeval Bialowieza Forest, on the Polish-Russian (now Belarus) border, a major through route where many cultures came in contact over the centuries and perhaps to no surprise it is the birth place of Esperanto.
Danuta is a graduate of Fine Arts Lyceum in Suprasl where she specialised in tapestry and painting. While at the lyceum she was introduced to clay modelling which led her to studying sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. She received her MA in 1987 having specialised in medallic art. In 1988 she moved to London where she was an inaugural student of a Contemporary Art Medal Course at the Royal College of Art and on completion she became a visiting lecturer there, a position she held for over two decades.
Active and prolific career includes public and private commissions, exhibitions and teaching in UK and abroad as well as winning a fair number of competitions. Her works are represented in many notable national and private collections including the British Museum, V&A and the Goldsmiths’ Company. For her services to the promotion of medallic art she was recently presented with Marsh Award and with the Freedom of the City of London.
She works in several media and techniques but modelling and polychromy are her all time favourites. Focus on tactile aspects of sculpture is reflected in the often intimate scale of her work. In pursuit of pure form her work is devoid of superfluous details and narration is minimal. Inspiration and ideas come from looking at organic and inorganic forms, balancing familiar against unknown, trying to capture the fleeting transitional moments while remaining watchful of the borderlines.
“In my artistic practice I strive to achieve a synthesis and I hope that there are enough clues left in my work for the viewer to recognise where it originated. I also hope that when the viewer engages in interpretation they will enjoy arriving at the crossroads where my input ends and their own journey begins.”
