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Fiona Rae Night Vision 1998
Fiona Rae
Night Vision 1998
© Fiona Rae
Oil and acrylic on canvas
2440mm x 2135 mm
Night Vision 1998
© Fiona Rae
Oil and acrylic on canvas
2440mm x 2135 mm
Read transcriptNight Vision belongs to a series of 'black' paintings Rae made in the late 1990s. As with all of these paintings, an initial, uniform layer of black acrylic was applied first with a roller, followed by the various coloured and textured forms of oil paint on top.
Tom Learner is a Senior Conservation Scientist at Tate and has been responsible for establishing analytical techniques that can be used to identify 20th century painting materials. He has published widely, including The Impact of Modern Paints and is currently co-ordinating the Modern Paints Research project, a collaborative venture between Tate, the Getty Conservation Institute (Los Angeles) and the National Gallery of Art (Washington DC).
Fiona Rae is a widely exhibited painter who lives and works in London. She studied at Croydon College of Art and then Goldsmiths College in the mid-1980s. In 1988 fellow artist Damien Hirst included her work in his exhibition Freeze. She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1991, and was represented in Charles Saatchi's show "Sensation" at the Royal Academy in 1997. Numerous exhibitions have featured her work more recently in France, Germany, the Americas and the UK. She was elected a Royal Academician in 2002 and has been a Tate Trustee since 2005. Tate currently holds five paintings by Fiona Rae in its Permanent Collection.
Detail one
Detail of the right hand edge of the painting showing a number of different effects created with oil paint over the uniform and matt background acrylic black.
Detail two
Raking-light detail (lit from the left) of the central section of the painting showing Rae's handling of oil paint. Areas of impasto (ie height) are apparent from the shadows cast across the paintings surface.
Detail three
Highly-magnified detail of blended oil paint in one of the areas in which Rae dragged the paint across the black acrylic under layer.
