Life and career[edit]

Rae was born in Hong Kong and also lived in Indonesia before moving to England in 1970. She attended Croydon College of Art to study a Foundation Course (1983–1984) and Goldsmiths College (1984–1987), where she completed a BA (Hons) Fine Art.

Young British Artist[edit]

In 1988 she participated in Freeze an exhibition of art organised by Damien Hirst in London Docklands; the exhibition helped launch a generation of artists who became known as Young British Artists or YBAs.^[1]

In 1991, Rae was shortlisted for the Turner Prize, and in 1993 she was nominated for the Austrian Eliette Von Karajan Prize for Young Painters.^[2]

She was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2002 and is referred to as a Royal Academician^[3] allowing the use of RA after her name. In 2002 she was appointed a Tate Artist Trustee between 2005 and 2009.^[4] She was commissioned by Tate Modern to create a 10-metre triptych Shadowland for the restaurant there in 2002.

In December 2011, she was appointed Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy, one of the first two female professors since the Academy was founded in 1768.^[5]

Rae is represented by Timothy Taylor Gallery, London; Buchmann Galerie, Berlin; Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and The Pace Gallery, New York. Rae has exhibited extensively in museums and galleries internationally and her work is held in public and private collections worldwide. Of her work, William Corwin summarizes, "Rae’s paintings are very much objects to be admired; windows into worlds in which she is mistress, giving the viewer over to a semi-recognizable, occasionally comforting, but mostly alien dreamscape."^[6]

British painter. She completed a foundation course at Croydon College of Art (1983–4), and a BFA at Goldsmiths College, London (1984–7). Her reputation was quickly established; a year after her inclusion in the exhibition Freeze (curated by fellow artist Damien Hirst in 1988), she showed at the Waddington Galleries in London. She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1991. Rae makes highly coloured, vivid abstract paintings that draw on and develop a variety of formal, painterly motifs. Common to all her work is the self-conscious juxtaposition of flat areas of colour with dragged, daubed or scumbled paint marks. Although her compositions can appear accidental, almost arbitrary, close inspection reveals a highly controlled handling of paint and style and a tight underlying structure. As her work developed throughout the 1990s it became still more structured, and focused in a more condensed manner on certain motifs. Untitled (Parliament) (oil and acrylic on canvas, 2.74×2.44 m, 1996; London, Saatchi Gal.) presents varied target motifs, perhaps referring to paintings made in the early 1960s by Kenneth Noland, floating in a furious field of black and white. The stillness and formal calm of the circles plays off the chaos of their surround, an instance of the strongly antithetical juxtapositions that Rae often employs. Her approach to painting is based on a playful engagement with her predecessors, using both quotation and a repertoire of surface effects to suggest both the superficiality and self-absorption of the act of painting.