Dani Trew

Dani Trew (b.1991) lives and works in London. Historical objects, contemporary fashion, and architectural forms recur throughout Trew’s paintings and drawings, bringing with them constellations of emotional, symbolic and cultural associations. Shaped in part by Trew’s curatorial background and multicultural upbringing, the work emerges from an experience of inhabiting multiple cultural and aesthetic worlds at once. Her paintings and drawings create spaces where historical fragments, remembered images and aesthetic encounters are continually rearranged into provisional wholes. Rather than resolving these different inheritances, the work holds contradiction in suspension, generating visual relationships that are at once historical, psychological and deeply personal.

Trew studied English Literature at the University of Oxford, and History of Design at the Royal College of Art, before undertaking doctoral research on fashion and politics in late nineteenth-century Britain. She worked as an Assistant Curator in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Furniture, Textiles and Fashion Department, contributing to exhibitions on fashion and design. In 2015 she was shortlisted for the BP Portrait Award, and in 2023 graduated from the Royal Drawing School’s postgraduate programme. Her first solo exhibition, To Make Shirts from Anemones, took place at Lyndsey Ingram in 2024.