Fiona Rae

Born in Hong Kong and raised in Indonesia and England, Fiona Rae creates paintings that combine elements of European and American postwar abstraction with Eastern notions of composition and balance. Rae originally came to prominence as one of the cohort of Young British Artists in the late 1980s, though her work was and remains typically more expressive and effervescent than many of her YBA peers. Works like her 2006 oil and acrylic painting I’m learning to fly!! include elements of Abstract Expressionist mark-making, hearts, illustrative fawns, and biomorphic line drawing suggestive of internal organs. Rae plays with kitsch and earnestness gleefully and prettily.

Rae is a member of London’s Royal Academy, was a 1991 nominee for the Turner Prize, and is an artist trustee of the London’s Tate Gallery. She has had prominent exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel, the Tate London, the Venice Biennial, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Berlin’s Museum für Gegenwart, among others.