In a new series of blogs looking at what’s on in the North as it opens, we sent Alice Miller to the new Fiona Rae exhibition at Leeds City Art Gallery.
'Maybe you can live on the moon in the next century', 2009 © Fiona Rae; Courtesy, The Pace Gallery, New York; Timothy Taylor Gallery, London
Continuing the city’s courtship of the YBAs, Fiona Rae is the latest artist of that generation to be exhibited at Leeds Art Gallery, following recent solo shows by Gary Hume and Damien Hirst. The exhibition of Rae’s work, titled Maybe you can live on the moon in the next century, brings together a selection of seventeen paintings made within the last ten years.
Rae is known for her vibrant and densely painted canvases, which she has been creating for over two decades. Throughout her career, Rae’s vision has remained singular and idiosyncratic, and the works on display in Leeds pay testimony to this.
In her works, Rae deploys a dizzying array of painterly techniques and abstract gestures, combining thick, sloppy brush-smears with sleek graphic motifs, detailed cartoon figures, and calligraphic lines. All is rendered with a palette of intensely lurid colour. This gleeful abundance of forms, colours, and gestures, comes together in a heady mix, to almost nauseating effect. Rae’s claustrophobic and cluttered canvases achieve a visual overload, never allowing the eye to rest. Instead we cannot help but flit from one alluring form to the next, from a day-glo explosion to an intricate floral motif. In these dense, palimpsestic paintings, each constituent part competes and overlaps with the next. In one work, rainbow strands of paint jostle for space alongside cartoon pandas. In another, bright painterly marks become engulfed by a splash of black dripping down the canvas.
‘The woman who can do self-expression will shine through all eternity’, 2010 © Fiona Rae; Courtesy, Buchmann Galerie, Berlin; Timothy Taylor Gallery, London
Through painting, Rae creates immersive and highly personal worlds, with each canvas having a atmosphere uniquely its own. The works appear dream-like and hallucinatory in their ambiguity of space. Familiar forms fuse together to create worlds that are unfamiliar and alien, where space becomes intangible and otherworldly. In certain works there is a sense of the cosmic or planetary, as brightly coloured forms float in front of darkly rendered backgrounds. Rae’s use of ‘cutesy’ imagery, such as cartoon animals and flowers, evokes childlike worlds of fantasy, bringing touches of sweetness to the violent chaos of her compositions.
Rae’s canvases swell with such excess of energy and colour that to appreciate the overwhelming multiplicity contained within these works, they must be seen in the flesh.
Fiona Rae: Maybe you can live on the moon in the next century is on display at Leeds Art Gallery from today until 26th August 2012.
Alice Miller is a History of Art postgraduate and writer based in Leeds, currently working at the Henry Moore Institute.
Published 11.05.2012 by Bryony Bond
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