“Over the years, Rae has explored the meanders of [her] visual flow, articulating her pictorial logic in keeping with a cognitive logic: what is at stake is knowledge of the contemporary world. In other words, her painting constitutes an atlas. What are the forms that activate our presence in the world, or attest to it?”
—Nicolas Bourriaud
Animating the monochromatic white ground through the loose application of electric blue, orange, black and red, Fiona Rae’s Untitled demonstrates the hallmarks of the artist’s painterly practice in the nascent part of her career. Rae’s energetic gesture is at once spontaneous yet restrained: expressive elements on the cusp of figuration.
Conceived at a pivotal moment in Fiona Rae’s career, a year before being shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1991, Rae is among the generation of Young British Artists (YBAs). A movement that was emboldened with a youthful, irreverent energy, Rae was included in Damien Hirst’s infamous exhibition Freeze in 1988 yet was distinct through her allegiance to paint among the new waves of installation and film.
Born in Hong Kong in 1963 and living in Indonesia before moving to England, Fiona Rae is celebrated internationally, subject to a range of solo exhibitions including at the Kunsthalle Basel, 1992; ICA London, 1993-94 and the Carré d’Art, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Nîmes, 2002. Elected as a Royal Academician in 2002, the artist’s work is also held in significant institutional collections including, among many others, the Tate, London; the Albertina Museum, Vienna; the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. and the Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris.
