Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by two British painters, Fiona Rae and Dan Perfect.
Both these artists find space between the abstract and the representational world in unique and distinctive ways. Committed to the expressive and enduring language of painting, they share a deep interest in our contemporary experience refracted through technology and cultural media, with manifestly different outcomes in their work. Perfect and Rae are married and live together, working in separate studios in the same building in London’s East End.
Painting’s power is to conjure and focus an individual and idiosyncratic vision, and this exhibition is an opportunity to contemplate both the contrasts and connections between these individual artists’ compelling artistic worlds. Rae and Perfect have exhibited together previously in various group exhibitions, but this is the first major simultaneous presentation of their paintings in a public gallery and museum. This exhibition is curated by Tristram Aver and also marks the first dedicated contemporary painting exhibition at Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery for many years.
Fiona Rae is known for her bravura improvisation and iconoclastic unsettling of painting tropes and traditions. With a battery of graphic and painterly marks, signs, symbols and appropriated images, Rae continues to explore fearlessly what it is to be a modern painter in personal and dynamically vivid new works.
Dan Perfect’s cinematically scaled paintings have a restless energy woven through their dense compositions. Grounds and figures interact to depict a seething interior world; the paintings are a tumult of ambiguous forms containing allusions to lost toys, dream characters and masks, with hybrid animal/humans roaming fictional interior landscapes - a mélange of the science-fictional and archetypal unconscious.
