FIONA RAE

NEW YORK – Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by British artist Fiona Rae, on view 31 October - 7 December. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated publication featuring a text by the artist.

“My idea for the Word series is that each painting embodies a sentence or quote. There is no intention to illustrate the meaning or emotion of the particular sentence; instead, the languages of abstraction and literature twist around each other and, I hope, give rise to new and unexpected images and meaning. I have a long-standing interest in the skirmish between intelligibility and ambiguity; language is mutable, not literal, barely holding back the chaos even though it is our opportunity to understand each other and make sense of the world. Indeed, as Krazy Kat said so wisely, ‘Lenguage is that we may mis-unda-stend each udda.’

“Each word is a little depth-charge of meaning and associations; even letters carry their own handbags and histories, as do paint marks and shapes that trail art history like phosphorescence. So the dialectic of running these two language systems alongside each other leads to a third set of possibilities, and if we’re jolly lucky, the emergence of something not previously known …”

- Fiona Rae, 2024

Fiona Rae (b. 1963 in Hong Kong) studied at Croydon College of Art and received her Bachelor of Arts from Goldsmiths College in London. In 1988, Rae, along with many of those who would become the Young British Artists, participated in the seminal show ‘Freeze,’ in London. Rae exhibited in the Aperto 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 almost four decades, Rae’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Carré d’Art, Nîmes, France; Centre d’Art La Malmaison, Cannes, France; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, United Kingdom; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland and Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds, United Kingdom, amongst others.

Rae has been included in exhibitions in numerous international institutions such as the Albertina Modern, Vienna, Austria; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; CentroCentro, Madrid, Spain; Fundació La Caixa, Palma de Mallorca, Spain; Guangdong Museum, Guangzhou, China; Hayward Gallery, London, United Kingdom; Institute of Contemporary Arts of Singapore, Singapore; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China; Serpentine Galleries, London, United Kingdom; Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom; Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom; and Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom.

Fiona Rae’s work may be found in the public collections of the Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, United Kingdom; British Council, London, United Kingdom; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Government Art Collection, United Kingdom; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Morsbroich Museum, Leverkusen, Germany; Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Tate Collection, London, United Kingdom; and elsewhere.

The artist lives and works in London, United Kingdom.

For press inquiries, please contact press@milesmcenery.com

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Selected Works

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