Awardwinners Announced - Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2026
Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2026 - Awardwinners Announced - Wednesday 16 September 2026
£18,000 of awards were announced at the exhibition launch on Wednesday 16 September - for drawings by Yvonne Crossley, Elena Grossi and Lucie Holzer, with commendations for drawings by Siân Bowen, Gary Lawrence and Simon Page.
Congratulations to each artist with a drawing included in the exhibition, selected from 2661 works submitted from 48 countries. The 2026 exhibition marks the ninth year of generous support from the Trinity Buoy Wharf Trust for Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize. The Trust also provides additional support for the educational programme devised by Drawing Projects UK, including an Education Pack, a Symposium on 17 September, with Drawing Sessions and Drawing Discussions throughout the exhibition.
Visitors can discover all of the shortlisted and award-winning works in the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2026 exhibition at Trinity Buoy Wharf in London from Thursday 17 September to Sunday 4 October 2026.
The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2026 of £15,000 was awarded to Yvonne Crossley for Octogenarian Dancer, 2025 (below).
The award winning drawing, Octogenarian Dancer by Yvonne Crossley, takes a single line off the page and into space to create a larger than life-size female figure entirely made from looped monofilament and wire. "We reside in a culture invested in youth, which maintains a vexed relationship with old age," said selector Professor Sook-Kyung Lee, Director of the Whitworth, "and that hasn't been much explored in art. This work is about an ageing woman's body, and how it changes through different stages." For Crossley, ageing isn't decline but multiplication: "a multiplicity of selves proliferates," past, present and imagined, pulling against one another. What Crossley is really drawing is age itself. The drawing will keep shifting shape throughout the exhibition, something Lee singled out: "I like the way this work really changed its shape throughout the selection process, and I am looking forward to seeing it evolving." In an art history stacked with young female bodies, Octogenarian Dancer stakes out rare ground: an ageing woman's body, unresolved and still moving.
Yvonne Crossley (b.1942 Weatherby, Yorkshire) lives in Wales and works in Herefordshire. She trained at Goldsmiths (1961–66) and holds a PhD in Fine Art Practice from Wimbledon School of Art/University of Surrey (2001) through which she researched how art can embody the meanings of ageing. Her work has been shown in numerous curated exhibitions from Tate's Young Contemporaries to Jerwood Gallery in Hastings, and has had solo exhibitions at Ikon Gallery and Royal West of England Academy, where she is an elected RWA Academician. She was previously shortlisted for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize (2021) and Trinity Buoy Wharf Working Drawing Award (2022). In 2014, she left her academic post as Professor and Vice-Principal at Wimbledon School of Art in 2004 to found The Drawing Gallery, London. She has been a selector of a number of awards for drawing including Jerwood Drawing Prize 2006.
The Student Award of £2,000 was awarded to giving only good, only good when giving, 2025, by Eelena Grossi, a drawing made with graphite on paper & tape on travertine, 42 x 26 x 2cm (below).
giving only good, only good when giving was, in Grossi's words, "born out of queer friendships and a series of coincidences." She found the source photograph by American artist and performer Del LaGrace Volcano in Sally R. Munt's 1998 anthology butch/femme: inside lesbian gender, a book she and friends came across in a queer bar and took with them. "I chose, during an afternoon in the studio, one picture to draw from the book: two muscular women facing the camera, standing back to back against the sky." For Grossi, the act of drawing them became something else entirely. "By pushing down the page softly with my fingers to keep it flat, so the picture would not appear distorted, I felt like I was doing something else rather than drawing, something like worship or love." Selector Anita Taylor reads that same tension in the finished piece: "It's really a drawing about touch… The surface of the travertine, the masking tape which holds the paper, and then the illusion of fingers holding the paper. You have a sense of a page on a page on a surface," with figures that you're "not quite sure whether they're about to punch each other or whether they're about to dance." Grossi taped the drawing to a found piece of travertine, "to explore material and formal questions that came up during the process in the studio, questions related to the act of drawing itself and to queer symbolism." Taylor calls the result "a quietly sophisticated piece" that "feels quite raw, and found and provisional": a student work that shows "an exploration, a curiosity, a sense of play" in search of a language of its own.
Elena Grossi (b.1999 Rome) studied Drawing at the Fine Arts University of Lisbon (2019–2023) and is now at the University of the Arts Berlin. Her work has shown in Berlin, Vienna and Milan, most recently Fluid Icons at CMC Studios, Berlin (2026). She lives and studies in Berlin.
The new Three Boroughs' Award of £1,000 was awarded to Luzie Holzer for Stairway at Dusk, 2026, ink, charcoal, graphite pencil on paper, 86 x 66cm.
Stairway at Dusk is drawn from the backstreets of Whitechapel and Stepney Green, in Tower Hamlets: places Lucie Holzer calls "forgotten by gentrification," overlooked in the rush "to monetise every inch of London." She's drawn to thresholds: "locked doorways, boarded-up windows and liminal entryways" that hint at interiors just out of reach, without ever giving them away. Working in ink, charcoal and graphite, she builds each drawing slowly, layering up dense, dark marks and then rubbing back into the paper to bury them again: a process that echoes, she says, "how histories of place are built and buried over time." Holzer draws from "a mix of memory, imagination and photographic reference," and lets non-naturalistic shadows and shifting perspectives bend the space until it feels slightly off, dreamlike. But for all that invention, the sense of place holds. It's specific enough that when selector Matthew Burrows MBE sat down in front of the piece, he realised he was looking at the staircase of a home he'd lived in twenty-five years ago. "I didn't realise straight away… It took a little time to figure it out, but it looked very familiar," he says. Then the anomalies started to surface: steps that don't go anywhere, spatial dimensions that "don't quite add up." "This isn't exactly photographic. There are changes to it, things that have been moved around... a lot of thinking in how this is constructed," he says, comparing the jolt of recognition to "when you see your own name written down. It has a familiarity that other names don't have."
This is the first year of this award, established to reflect the communities that Trinity Buoy Wharf serves, by creating a specific award for a drawing made by an artist living and/or working within Tower Hamlets, Newham and Greenwich.
Lucie Holzer (b.1995 London) studied Painting and Printmaking at The Glasgow School of Art (2014–17) and Printmaking at the Royal College of Art (2021–23). Recent shows include Bainbridge Uncovered, The Handbag Factory (2026), and Cubitt Invites, Cubitt Artists Studios (2025). She's held residencies at Dumfries House and in Pano Lefkara, Cyprus, and lives and works in London.
Four drawings were highly commended by the Selection Panel:
Siân Bowen Collapsible Spaces: Interstices, 2026, pencil and wheat starch on singed and incised kozo paper, 185 x 149 x 2cm by Siân Bowen (below)
Rhodes Old Town, 2025, Biro on paper, 127 x 119cm, by Gary Lawrence (below).
Club Street Malia, 2025, felt pen, Biro on paper, 177 x 322cm by Gary Lawrence (below)
‘I'll be OK', 2024-25, ink on paper, collage, 120 x 130cm by Simon Page
The 2026 exhibition marks the ninth year of generous support from the Trinity Buoy Wharf Trust for Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize. The Trust also provides additional support for the educational programme devised by Drawing Projects UK, including an Education Pack, a Symposium on 17 September, with Drawing Sessions and Drawing Discussions throughout the exhibition.
The exhibition is free to visit and open from 11am to 6pm. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated Exhibition Publication, a downloadable Education Pack, and a programme of events including a Drawing Symposium on Thursday 17 September 2026.
The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2026 will tour to venues in the UK into 2027 after the initial exhibition at Trinity Buoy Wharf in London.
For more information about visiting the exhibition in London, please visit trinitybuoywharf.com
For more information about the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize, please visit the dedicated website trinitybuoywharfdrawingprize.org and follow @TBWDrawingPrize on Instagram.
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