Fiona Rae: Hong Kong Garden

Timothy Taylor Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition of new work by Fiona Rae, one of the most exciting and influential of Britain’s younger generation of painters.
 
In their assured energy and spontaneity, the paintings in Hong Kong Garden signal a new direction. Their inclusivity seems boundless and anything might take its place on the canvas. Signs and symbols, sometimes legible as parts of an alphabet, sometimes more abstract, are integrated with painterly and expressive gestures. The paintings are oil, acrylic and spray paint on canvas.
 
Over the last fifteen years, Rae has pursued her various interests through distinct phases of work; the early ‘phoney abstract’ paintings within which expressionist gestures, minimalist blocks of colour and fragments of pop imagery fought to coexist; the black-and-white paintings (1996 - 98) within which coloured discs hovered in a seething ground of black-and-white brushmarks, generating a sense of unease; the black paintings (1998 - 2000) which presented a stark, almost sci-fi vision of an abstract world.
 
In 2000, Rae started to fuse the high tech and the painterly. Using Photoshop to generate initial compositions, she then improvises directly onto the canvas. Rae says: ‘These images and fragments of language carry with them vestiges of their original meaning or significance and yet in their new setting can also suggest other interpretations. It’s like telling a story using half-remembered words and glimpses of mysterious imagery to create a vivid world in someone else’s imagination.’
 
Fiona Rae has shown widely in solo and group exhibitions, including the landmark exhibition Freeze, London (1988), Sensation, Royal Academy, London (1997), Saatchi Gallery (with Gary Hume, 1997), Hybrids, Tate Liverpool (2001) and Painting Pictures, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2003). In 2002 Fiona Rae’s work was the subject of a major exhibition at the Carré d’Art, Nîmes.
 
In 2002 Fiona Rae created a 10 metre-long triptych, Shadowland, commissioned for the Tate Modern Restaurant; and this year she was commissioned by the BBC to make a giant installation for the outside of Broadcasting House, Portland Place. Signal is a computer-generated image on vinyl, 22 by 15.4 metres, and is on display until October 2003.