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Fiona Rae
Shortlisted: 1991

Rae emerged as a painter in the late 1980s. Since then her work has explored the language of signs, challenging our expectations of paintings, of what they might be about or what they might contain. Her ambiguous marks encourage and yet frustrate any attempt to construct narratives from the painting. Every viewer will identify the imagery differently, so that a universally agreed meaning is impossible.

Fiona Rae was born in Hong Kong in 1963 and moved to England in 1970. From 1983 to 1987 she attended Croydon College of Art and Goldsmiths College. In 1991, Rae was nominated for the Turner Prize because of her contribution in 'extending the range of subject matter explored in abstract painting,' as seen at her exhibitions at Waddington Galleries.

This information has been taken from The Turner Prize: Twenty Years, by Virginia Button, Tate Publishing, 2003.

View Fiona Rae in the Tate Collection