Drawing Room Invites…

Drawing Room Invites… acknowledges our gratitude to the artists who so generously make and donate drawings to the Biennial and gives greater insight into their practices and the innovative work being made within the expanded field of drawing today. Anna Paterson, Alicia Reyes McNamara and Amba Sayal-Bennett were co-selected for this exhibition by Drawing Room’s team and a representative of the local community. For each artist, drawing forms an essential part of a multi-disciplinary practice, exploring themes relevant to contemporary society. This will be the first show in a public gallery for each artist.

Anna Paterson explores experimental processes of image-making on paper, incorporating techniques associated with printmaking, domestic cleaning and painting. Layers of paint are repeatedly removed and reapplied with wire wool, sponges and rags; destructive and constructive gestures made equivocal. Recent works incorporate folded patterned lines and perforated marks, loosely influenced by lace-making templates and hallucinatory visual phenomena. Paterson treats the paper’s surface as a plane of optical and emotional experience, a fragile reality that can be easily altered or disturbed. The works on show at Drawing Room have been configured into a series of surfaces that oscillate between compositional order, disorder, expansion, and containment.

Alicia Reyes McNamara’s mutating and shapeshifting beings in fantastical landscapes are part of a queering of religious rituals and folklore, informed by her Mexican and Irish ancestry. Working on small and large scale in the tactile, pleasurable medium of colour pastel, the vivid saturation and bright light in these works embody a sense of freedom found in the ecstatic. Her recent works are influenced by Catholic religious imagery, specifically the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa and the Temptation of Saint Anthony, questioning ideas around devotion and blurring the boundaries between the sacred and the earthly. These works are exuberant, expansive interpretations of these traditional subjects, part of the artist’s personal exploration of the spiritual and the ecstatic through the intimate medium of drawing.

Amba Sayal-Bennett traces forms, bodies and knowledge across different sites following a migratory logic. Informed by architecture and medicine, she works with computer-aided design software to create digital drawings that displace the body. These are transformed into smoothly intricate three-dimensional objects in cool, neutral tones, often made with metal that bends and folds like paper, translating visceral human physicality into something clean and machine-like. These cut-away, layered works are informed by Western histories of medicine, of controlling and containing the body through schematised illustrations, in contrast to the more holistic, metaphysical and syncretic ways of understanding the body passed down by the artist’s South Asian forebears.

About the artists

Anna Paterson (b. 1989) received her BA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London (2009–2012) and later studied at the Royal Academy Schools, London (2013–2016). In 2014, she was a guest student in the class of Peter Doig at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Recent exhibitions include: Losts, Palio, Cape Town (2024); Hearts, Lungley Gallery (2022); Wastebook, Mackintosh Lane, London (2022); Rvr, Turner’s House, London (2021); and Goodbye Sun, Hope, London (2019); The 12th House, The White Ermine, Düsseldorf (2025); exocarp, Calico, London (2024); Formes, Galerie PCP, Paris (2024); White Trash, The White Ermine, Düsseldorf (2024); From Transparent Juices, Lungley Gallery, London (2023); Double Dream, Mackintosh Lane, London (2020); Dream 1, Vermland, Copenhagen (2020). Paterson was Artist in Residence at Turner’s House, London (2021–2022) and Nordisk Kunstnarsenter Dale, Norway (2019). She was awarded the Agnes Ethel Mackay Painting Prize (2016) and the Albert Irvin Painting Prize (2016).

Alicia Reyes McNamara (b.1984)  is originally from Chicago and currently lives and works in London, England. Their work was recently included in Christie’s “Women to Watch” (2023) and earlier at Bloomberg New Contemporaries exhibition in the Liverpool Biennial and at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Recent exhibitions include: Five Car Garage, Los Angeles; Niru Ratman, London;  Whitechapel Gallery, London; Lismore Castle, Lismore; Skowhegan School of Painting Residency, Maine. Other residencies and awards include:  South London Gallery Graduate Residency 2016-17; Kiosko Gallery in Bolivia through Gasworks and Triangle Network, Bemis Center For Contemporary Arts, Hospitalfeild, Jerwood Bursary, and the Chisenhale Studio Summer Residency.

Amba Sayal-Bennett (b. 1991) lives and works in London. Sayal-Bennett received her BFA from Oxford University, and her MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art. She was awarded her PhD in Art Practice and Learning from Goldsmiths and has published her practice-based research with Tate Papers. Between January and March 2022, she was The Derek Hill Foundation scholar at the British School at Rome in Italy. Recent exhibitions include: Anatomy of parts, Indigo+Madder, London, (2025); Artist’s Rooms, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai (2024); Geometries of Difference, Somerset House, London (2022); Horror in the Modernist Block, IKON, Birmingham (2022); My Mother Was a Computer, Indigo+Madder, London (2022); and Tomorrow, White Cube, London (2021).