BERLIN.- Buchmann Galerie Berlin announces an exhibition of a new set of drawings by Fiona Rae (*1963, lives in London).

The works presented in this exhibition form a decided and intensely concentrated body of work. Never before has Fiona Rae focused so closely on the medium of drawing.

The major part of her painterly work makes extensive use of bold colour. What makes this exhibition of drawings stand out is the fact that Fiona Rae has set aside her broad colour palette to focus exclusively on black charcoal.

Drawing with charcoal seems almost like a liberation, opening up the potential to give the issue of form and background, space, areas and lines a new level of concentrated dynamism. Fiona Rae’s signature is clearly legible in these works. In a very loose form, they show the visual codes that she has developed in her painting oeuvre over the past years using fragments culled from the internet, from films, from advertising and pop culture in the broadest sense or from the work of Albrecht Dürer or Hieronymus Bosch. Fiona Rae avoids appropriating these sources, using them instead as windows onto her own distinctive pictorial lexicon.

The charcoal drawings are immediate, expressive and at the same time fascinatingly calculated, creating unique dreamscapes, which reflect the artist’s personal strength and dynamism. The end result is a direct and spontaneous gesture on paper that, in turn, is based on insight gained in previous work and which gives these drawings their inescapable explosiveness.