Patrons: Studio Saturday with Lisa Milroy RA and Mali Morris RA
Saturday 19 May 2018 10.30am - 2pm
East London
Free. Patrons only.
In the late 1800s, any fashionable artist submitting to the Royal Academy’s annual Summer Exhibition would take part in the spectacle of ‘Show Sunday’, a day when artists’ would open up their studios to receive friends and guests. We have revived the tradition, only now on a Saturday. Patrons are invited to tour the studios of Royal Academicians and learn first-hand about the process of being involved with the world’s largest open submission exhibition of contemporary art.
This year we are excited to visit Royal Academicians Lisa Milroy and Mali Morris in their East London studios. We will hear about their experiences of being part of the 250-year-old tradition of the Summer Exhibition and discover the process behind their work.
Still life is at the heart of Milroy’s practice. In the 1980s her paintings featured everyday objects against an off-white ground. Subsequently her imagery expanded to include depictions of objects within settings and landscape, architecture and people. As her approaches to still life diversified, so did her manner of painting, giving rise to a range of stylistic and installation strategies. Throughout her practice, Milroy has been fascinated by the relation between stillness and movement, and the nature of making and looking at paintings.
Mali Morris makes families of individual paintings which relate strongly to one and other. Her concentrated compositions engage the viewer in the contemplation of pure abstraction, in which colour relationships structure a luminosity that emanates, creating complex layers of space. They explore the language of painting and its ever changing expressive possibilities.