Timothy Taylor Gallery

Fiona Rae has developed a complex, powerful and highly individual body of work. Employing a battery of painterly marks, graphic signs and symbols, her paintings explore the profusion of our visual and material culture and take us on an exhilarating ride through the possibilities of paint. In recent work the mood is ambiguous – flowers, hearts and cartoon characters might imply a sweet, almost cloying world, yet Rae’s dark and brooding palette, combined with virtuoso washes and veils of paint, evoke dissolution and decay. The paintings seem to suggest the seductions, contradictions and disappointments of contemporary life and culture.

Born in Hong Kong in 1963, Rae completed a BA Hons Fine Art degree at Goldsmiths College in 1987. The following year, she participated in Damien Hirst’s Freeze in London’s Docklands, and within four years of graduating, she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize, Tate Gallery, 1991. Rae has exhibited extensively in museums and galleries internationally and her work is held in prestigious public and private collections worldwide. Group shows include: Unbound, Hayward Gallery, London, 1994; Nuevas Abstracciones, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 1996; Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy of Arts, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1997-2000; Pictograms, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, 2006; Fiction@Love, Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, 2006 and Classified: Contemporary Art at Tate Britain, Tate Britain, 2009. Solo exhibitions have included Kunsthalle Basel, 1992; ICA London, 1993-94; and the Carré d’Art, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Nîmes, 2002. Fiona Rae was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2002 and appointed a Tate Artist Trustee between 2005 and 2009. She lives and works in London.

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