Galerie Nathalie Obadia is very pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Fiona Rae at its Brussels gallery, having exhibited the artist six times at its Paris gallery since the start of their collaboration in 1994. The British artist is recognised as one of the most important abstract painters of her generation on the international scene.
Born in Hong Kong in 1963, Fiona Rae initially studied at Croydon College of Art in London before entering Goldsmiths College in 1984. This is where she first came into contact with Damien Hirst, Gary Hume and Sarah Lucas, with whom, among others, she became part of the Young British Artists (YBAs) group, the embodiment of the resurgence of the British art scene in the 1980s and 1990s. For over 30 years, Fiona Rae has been developing an oeuvre with a rich and complex vocabulary, one that both pays homage to the history of art — for example, the Pop resonance of certain motifs and the gestures specific to Abstract Expressionism — while at the same time producing a distinct and innovative visual language anchored in the contemporary.
The exhibition at Galerie Nathalie Obadia Brussels presents paintings and works on paper from 2015–2021, most of which were included in Fiona Rae: Many-Colour’d Messenger / Messagère aux diverses couleurs, Centre d'art La Malmaison, Cannes, France, 2021–2022. This selection in Brussels showcases the evolution of her work over the past few years, an overview that attests to her pictorial virtuosity and ability to conjure up vividly expressive and enigmatic images.
The exhibition begins on the first floor of the gallery with paintings from the Greyscale, Figure and Pastel series; the arrangement of the works reveals the variations in chromatic shifts through a dramatic sequence from light to dark. Rae’s brush marks create elusive and ethereal fairy-tale figures and cartoon characters, blending into and out of darker or lighter grounds, evoking some pictorial effects reminiscent of Photoshop, whilst remaining decidedly abstract. These fleeting figures reflect Fiona Rae’s improvisatory investigation of the evocative and imaginative possibilities inherent in abstraction.
On the second floor of the gallery, paintings from the Abstract series and Rae’s most recent Word series are presented, alongside a selection of works on paper. In the Abstract paintings, Rae abandons intentional references to the figurative, stating that she has “no intention of portraying the human figure, nor of implying a landscape, let alone a still life.” The brush marks are intended to represent only themselves. However, the impossibility of a “pure” and non-objective abstraction is revealed as the painterly forms inevitably evoke references and the suggestion of an imaginary field of activity.
The two most recent paintings, And nothing is but what is not (2021) and Yes I’m alone, but I’m alone and free (2021), are from the current Word series, which enacts the titles of the paintings over the surface of the canvas. The brush marks and shapes form letters and sentences with differing degrees of legibility and clarity, merging the languages of art with those of literature and popular culture. As Jean-Pierre Criqui writes, “[the painting] surface is...punctuated by the words, scattered, torn apart and transfigured into motifs – into figures, I was about to write – of painting.”¹ Rae’s references to Shakespeare, films and animation, metaphysical poetry and pop music within the same group of paintings point to the myriad of influences that inform her work and underline its profoundly contemporary dimension.
¹Jean-Pierre Criqui, Fiona Rae: Many-Colour’d Messenger / Messagère aux diverses couleurs, 2021, La Malmaison Cannes / Snoeck
