Galerie Nathalie Obadia is pleased to present Messages, Fiona Rae's seventh solo exhibition with the gallery. The British artist is recognized on the international scene as one of the foremost abstract painters of her generation. This exhibition also celebrates thirty years of fruitful collaboration between the artist and the gallery.
Fiona Rae first studied art at Croydon College of Art in London, before going on to study at Goldsmiths College in 1984. It was during this period that she met Damien Hirst, Angela Bulloch, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas and Michael Landy, amongst others, who all became known as part of the Young British Artists (YBAs) group. Together, they took part in the iconic Freeze exhibition organized by Damien Hirst in 1988. The rise of the YBAs to prominence in the 1990s was meteoric, so much so that today they embody the renaissance of the British art scene of the 1980s-2000s.
For almost forty years, Fiona Rae has been developing a body of work marked by a singular and constantly evolving aesthetic. Her work is rooted in unusual combinations of the history of painting, the graphic arts, European and Japanese cartoons, cinema and music. This new corpus continues the Words series begun in 2021, in which sentences and words are embodied on the canvas as a continuing investigation into the nature of abstraction. Fiona Rae's interest in alphabets and texts began at an early age; she initially studied English at university, before devoting herself entirely to contemporary art and to making paintings with an experimental approach to the possibilities of language. The artist's supple and precise gestures conjure up sensual compositions featuring a succession of letters in full flow. Freed from their initial function, the typographic characters depicted become purely abstract visual elements. Letters crisscross, merge, evaporate then collide, generating bursts of pictorial energy. Paradoxically, this dispersion keeps each composition in perfect balance.
Fiona Rae succeeds in reproducing the subtleties of language in the expressiveness of her brush marks. These simulate the intonations, plural sonorities and body movements that constitute the very essence of human expression. The observer's eye moves between the abstract forms, looking for ways to decipher them. The titles could function as indicators, facilitating the legibility of the exhibited works. Some refer to a Shakespearean phrase, others to a Disney cartoon, a comic strip, or even to Metaphysical poetry. Each composition is singular in its ability to embody both comedy and lofty ambition, magnificence and absurdity, presence and absence, constraints and infinite possibilities. Fiona Rae's paintings slip in and out of legibility, generating time and again persistent enigmas in the pictorial plane. According to the artist, this is one of the key points of painting, which tends to "propose and solve visual problems that did not exist until the painter approached the canvas and started making marks."
With its blend of great precision and the inevitable accidents of painting, Fiona Rae's work reminds us that painting is alive and vibrant, and that this is true even in the 21st century. As the artist says, painting "is a live art form. It is a way of mining all the different parts of your consciousness, your unconscious, your subconscious, and making some kind of experience out of them directly on the canvas. There is something about the touch on the canvas that exhibits or exemplifies a set of feelings or ideas in that moment." ¹
In today's increasingly contradictory and fast-paced world, Fiona Rae continues to paint with dedication and intensity. "If you want to survive-to thrive-you must keep operating, keep breathing. You must get back in the studio and keep painting."² says American art critic Christina Rees of Rae's work. Whilst being aware of the bleak face of our contemporary reality, the artist believes in renewal and the future. Fiona Rae's works suggest Messages, inviting us to enter the complexity of their world and to lose ourselves for a moment in an imaginary realm of the playful and the poetic.
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¹ Interview with Fiona Rae and Iwona Blazwick, Il faut cultiver votre jardin : Fiona Rae and Iwona Blazwick, Miles McEnery Gallery publication, 2022
² Christina Rees, I've Seen Things You People Wouldn't Believe: Fiona Rae in 2022, Miles McEnery Gallery publication, 2022
