FIONA RAE

Miles McEnery Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by Fiona Rae. The artist’s inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery will open on 20 October at 511 West 22nd Street and remain on view through 26 November 2022. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by Christina Rees and an interview with Iwona Blazwick.

Fiona Rae is an internationally regarded British artist whose abstract paintings expand the traditional boundaries of her field. Drawing on inspiration from Abstract Expressionism, Japanese anime, computer games, fashion and typography, Rae’s paintings deploy a wide range of pictorial marks and styles.

“Throughout her career, Rae has made paintings that are triumphs of abstraction to illustrate layered and complex truths about our world and our interior lives. Some of these truths are purely physical: how paint strokes resolve, how pigments layer, how line and shape redefine the plane but the second truth in her work is in the lyricism of the relationships between her figures–and they are figures, however conceptual and speculative they may be,” Christina Rees.

Rae’s latest series explores the confluence of abstraction and literature. The brushstrokes appear to form letters and words, but there is no simple reading of a text as these marks and shapes simultaneously form an abstract painting with all its ambiguities and all its painterly incidents and concerns. The titles, which are enacted as sentences on the canvas, are derived from both classical and popular culture, from Metaphysical poetry and film, pop music and Shakespeare. Fiona Rae thus challenges any rigid notion of cultural hierarchy whilst the myriad of influences that inform her work underline its profoundly contemporary dimension.

Fiona Rae (b. 1963, Hong Kong) studied at Croydon College of Art and received her Bachelor of Arts from Goldsmiths College in London. In 1988, Rae, along with what would become the Young British Artists, participated in the seminal show ‘Freeze,’ at Surrey Docks. Rae exhibited at the 44th Venice Biennale in 1990 and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1991. In 2002, the artist was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in London, where she was subsequently appointed Professor of Painting from 2011 to 2015.

Over an illustrious career spanning more than three decades, Rae’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Buchmann Galerie, Berlin, Germany; Carré d’Art, Nîmes, France; Centre d’Art La Malmaison, Cannes, France; Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris, France; Hakgojae Cheongdam, Seoul, South Korea; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, United Kingdom; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland; Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds, United Kingdom; Pace Gallery, New York, NY; Saatchi Gallery, London, United Kingdom, and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, United Kingdom, among others.

Rae has been included in group exhibitions at numerous international institutions such as the Albertina Modern, Vienna, Austria; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; CentroCentro, Madrid, Spain; FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France; Hayward Gallery, London, United Kingdom; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China; Serpentine Galleries, London, United Kingdom;Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom, and Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom.

Rae’s work may be found in the collections of The Albertina Museum,Vienna, Austria; Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France; Fond National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; Government Art Collection, United Kingdom; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,Washington, D.C.; Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg; Tate Collection, London, United Kingdom, and elsewhere.

The artist lives and works in London, United Kingdom.

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