Fiona Rae (Hong Kong, 1963) studied at the Croydon College of Art in London (1983–1984) and graduated from Goldsmiths College of the University of London (1984–1987), a school with an eminently conceptual approach and an experimental vision of creativity, known for its democratic take on materials and meanings. She currently lives and works in London.

In 1988, together with her classmates from Goldsmiths, Rae participated in “Freeze”, the famous exhibition organised by Damien Hirst in an abandoned building on the London docks. That episode would be the beginning of the Young British Artists (YBAs), who would come to be known for their open approach to materials and processes, the use of found objects, shock tactics and an entrepreneurial mentality. In 1997, the Royal Academy of Arts, London, inaugurated the now-celebrated exhibition of new British art, “Sensation”, a selection of works from the Saatchi Collection that reflected the enthralling dynamism of that period in the United Kingdom, with the participation of Fiona Rae.

Rae developed her work through series, always using an idea or feature able to explore the marks or gestures of abstraction. In her largely-improvised compositions, she juxtaposes improbable marks of paint or other elements, free to radically modify components and inspirations. In the first decade of this century, the artist began to use photoshop to project the geometric shapes of her paintings, reflecting new visual conventions of the digital generation. Her experimentation continued with the use of letters as compositional shapes, expanding her lexicon to include cartooning, blending humour and ambiguity in an abstract terrain. From 2014 to 2017, Rae revitalised her work by abandoning colour and reducing her palette to white, black and grey, to then reintroduce chromatism through tones that were magical and artificial. Since 2019 Rae has explored the possibilities of abstraction and written language—in poetry, cinema and music—creating pictorial compositions where she plays in intriguing fashion with legibility and pure abstraction.

Rae has exhibited her work internationally in various solo and group exhibitions, including: Serpentine Gallery (London, 1989); Kunsthalle Basel (Switzerland, 1992); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, 1996); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (1996); Hayward Gallery (London, 1994); Tate Liverpool (United Kingdom, 2001); Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, 2002); Carré d’Art – Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes (France, 2002); Singapore Art Museum (Singapore, 2006); Tate Britain (London, 2019); Guangdong Museum (Guangzhou, China, 2024), Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma (Mallorca, 2026).

Her work is found in the collections of leading museums, such as: Tate Collection (United Kingdom); Albertina Museum (Vienna); Musée national d’art moderne Centre Pompidou (Paris); Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon); Fonds régional d’art contemporain d’Auvergne (Clermont-Ferrand, France); Fundació ”la Caixa” (Barcelona); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Smithsonian Institution, Washington D. C.); Fonds national d’art contemporain (Paris), National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, Australia), National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington D. C.), and Fundació Barrié (A Coruña).

C. G.