Untitled (grey and brown) 1991
Fiona Rae (born 1963) is a British artist and one of the Young British Artists (YBAs). She is a painter.
She was born in Hong Kong and moved to England in 1970. She attended Croydon College of Art (1983-84) and Goldsmiths College (1984-1987).
She was one of the artists in the seminal Freeze exhibition curated by Damien Hirst in 1988. Her work was subsequently bought by Charles Saatchi and shown in the major 1997 Sensation exhibition, which brought Britart into the establishment, as it was hosted by the Royal Academy, London, before touring abroad. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1991, and in 1993 for the Austrian Eliette Von Karajan Prize for Young Painters. She was commissioned by Tate Modern to create a 10 metre triptych Shadowland for the restaurant there in 2002
Rae is now a Royal Academician and also a Trustee of the Tate Gallery, both significant accolades for the artist.
Her work is abstract, and makes a Postmodern use of a seemingly random assemblage of painterly applications in order to create new and unexpected juxtapositions on the canvas. It is a cool and much more cerebral version of Abstract Expressionism.
In a statement for a 2005 residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, she commented [1]
I like lively, heartfelt and witty art that can also be cool and ironic. Doesn’t necessarily have to be painting, but that’s my favorite thing, partly because I think it’s the hardest way to be fresh and original in the 21st century.
Excerpt From Wikipedia
I think This painting is really nice because it mixes colour and shape. I understand some people do not like modern art but i find it is a great piece.
Hey Jeremy,
Fiona creates wonderful shapes and juxtapositions in her work. What I find compelling in this piece is the underlying structure that holds the work together. Underneath all the energy and excitement of the surface is this luscious grey shape. The shape sets up an underlying division of space that activates the eye and sets up the spacial tensions. If you can just look at the shape and the ground, you can see the play of positive and negative space. None of the black shapes sits on the same plane and she is able to get the shape and the ground to move in out of each other. For instance, the black on the left side of the canvas is sliding under the grey shape while the black on the bottom right and top-center right are clearly moving in front. Even more interesting is how she is able to get areas of the grey shape to slide ahead and behind each other so that the shape as a whole does not sit on the same plane. Not easy…
Now, all the shapes and gestures dance and move around within this space created by the figure/ground relationship. They also carve up the canvas into still more interesting negative shapes and forms, so that both the shapes themselves and the spaces between the shapes are equally interesting. In fact, one could make the argument that the spaces between the shapes are actually more interesting than the shapes and gestures. Regardless, in this painting, Fiona Rae creates this wonderful expansion and contraction, like breathing, that gives the painting life and energy.