Galerie Nathalie Obadia will present new paintings by Fiona Rae. Aged 35, she lives and works in London.
After her solo exhibition at the gallery in 1994, Fiona Rae has participated in numerous exhibitions in Europe and America.
Associated with the New English School, which the touring exhibition Sensation made widely known, she is the best representative of abstract painting in an English context where painting is generally more concerned with the human figure in the tradition of Bacon and Freud.
This winter she is participating in an exhibition entitled Colour Me Blind at the Kunsthalle in Stuttgart. All the invited painters use or are inspired by images from video games and cartoons. Abstraction allows Fiona Rae to decipher contemporary media such as comics and television. She creates her own pictorial language from these references.
Fiona Rae's paintings are very energetic, even violent, in their gestures and are mostly composed of bright colors. Fiona Rae gives a contemporary and sociological vitality to abstract painting in a very media-oriented sense while not neglecting references to more classical abstraction. One can think of Hodgkin, English like her, but also of Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg or Jonathan Lasker. Peter Halley, a little older than her, also expresses through abstraction his concern and vision of the urban and contemporary world.
Fiona Rae is more interested in popular everyday culture. Her latest paintings are composed of a black background on which brightly colored movements of paint spring up. We are in front of a video screen, a television set or a game console.
Fiona Rae's paintings bring a vivid sociological perspective that makes contemporary abstraction relevant.
