29th May - 17th June - London Gallery
24th June - 12th July - Bath Gallery
Adam Gallery is proud to present new work by Royal Academician, Scottish-born painter and printmaker, Barbara Rae.
For this exhibition she returns to a few of her favourite places in Ireland, France and Spain in search of the passing of time and how it erodes and alters what
we see and sense. Whether abstract or near-abstract, her work remains quietly subversive, political in social subjects chosen, and luminously evocative of time
and mood.
Rae spends weeks in one area among the people, studying their diverse ways and lives, searching out historic enclaves and artefacts that might make painterly
images, experiencing the landscape in all weathers and light, before opening a sketch book to record general subject matter, form and pattern.
The small works are perfect capsules of objects and moments. The large works are powerful evocations of the hand of mankind on domestic buildings and the
land. They are intense, passionate, lucid, and emotionally moving. They dissect what the rest of us see from a quick glance; they see what we overlook. Their
physical presence is a wonderful assembly of vibrant colour and tactile surfaces – almost three dimensional.
Rae is a painter’s painter. She leads by the strength of her vision, and by the sheer technical mastery of the materials she uses. She retains an apparent ease to
create beauty from dissonance. She paints beyond the capability of the camera. Anybody moved to imitate her soon discovers her images are deceptively simple,
her vocabulary of techniques extremely complicated. The eye is drawn to key objects and their relationship one to another, but unhurried observation discovers
more and more half-hidden detail. In the rush to knock down fine art and supplant it with inert installations and ‘ideas,’ many of them bad, she is one of the few
contemporary artists whose work attracts the distinction ‘art and beauty’ appended without irony.
Rae remains a master of her chosen material. It is honest, direct, and uplifting. In a world of consumerism and shallow fashion, she offers the enduring and the
accessible, culture and life as art.