Dimensions: support: 2134 x 1981 x 44 mm
Copyright: © Fiona Rae | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Editor: This is Fiona Rae’s large-scale, mixed media painting, "Untitled (emergency room)." It feels so chaotic, yet strangely ordered. What do you see in this piece? Curator: The circles, those glyphs, those fields of monochrome and the marbling…it's like a shattered alphabet struggling to reassemble. The cultural memory embedded in these forms is fascinating. Editor: Shattered alphabet? That's interesting. Curator: Yes, and the "emergency room" in the title is compelling. Does it suggest a site of trauma or one of healing? Or perhaps both? These shapes recur in Rae's work like fragments of a shared visual language. Editor: I hadn’t considered them as language, but now I see how they might function that way. Curator: Indeed. I'm struck by the potential for these symbols to mean different things to different viewers. Editor: I'll definitely be thinking about how symbols operate differently for different people from now on.
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http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/rae-untitled-emergency-room-t07462
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Untitled (emergency room) is one of two recent paintings by the artist acquired in 1998. Their purchase supplements two earlier works by Rae that are also owned by the Tate Collection and give depth to her representation here. Typically, Rae combines contrasting ways of applying paint within a single canvas, leaving the viewer unable to read the painting in any one way. Vividly coloured geometric disks play against a background of vigorous black and white brushwork. Rae graduated from Goldsmiths College in 1987 and participated in Damien Hirst's Freeze show the following year. She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1991. Gallery label, August 2004
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