Fiona Rae "Special Fear!"

The Pace Gallery (32 E 57th St)

poster for Fiona Rae "Special Fear!"

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Since the early 1990s, Fiona Rae’s canvases have acted as arenas where divergent stylistic elements from seemingly dissonant sources come together within a single composition. Stylized letters, cartoon characters, brushstrokes, wild colors and poured paint hold their ground with perfect tension. “While the elements can certainly be analyzed for their stylistic origins,” Marc Glimcher explains in the catalogue essay, “they are finally just resonant images and forms which allow the artist to make use of her gift for constructing a painting. In spite of critics’ efforts to reduce the inhabitants of Rae’s painting to a semiotic flashcard, nothing could be further from the native experience of making the painting or the uncoerced experience of viewing it.” Like the masters that precede her, Rae builds her paintings from beautifully constructed layers, one informing the next, “following what seems to be the next layer of some other painting”….“Muscular drips might serve as the under painting for a scattering of sticker-like bunny rabbits. Networks of dotted lines may follow bunnies and precede organic clumps of vegetal brushstrokes. Passionate brushstrokes are rebuffed by the delicate line drawings that preceded them.” While traditionally painters have utilized technique to both construct a painting and erase the evidence of its construction, Rae makes the process of her paintings’ construction an indelible part of the final composition. Each layer informs and controls the subsequent layer, which “brilliantly reminds us of the tactile experience of building and constructing a painting.”

[Image: Fiona Rae "All around us, our own world of wonder!" (2009) oil and acrylic on canvas 84 x 69 in.]

Media

Schedule

from April 02, 2010 to May 01, 2010

Opening Reception on 2010-04-01 from 18:00 to 20:00
The artist will be in attendance.

Artist(s)

Fiona Rae

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