Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition at Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery 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 will be 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, she continues to explore fearlessly what 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 melange of the science-fictional and archetypal unconscious.

The exhibition will travel to Southampton City Art Gallery, 18 July 2014–1 November 2014 and will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue.

The exhibition is organised by Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery in conjunction with Timothy Taylor Gallery and funded by Nottingham City Council and Arts Council England.

Fiona Rae (b.1963, Hong Kong) studied at Croydon College of Art, 1983-1984 and Goldsmiths College, London, 1984-1987. Public solo exhibitions include: Towner, Eastbourne, 2013; The New Art Gallery Walsall, 2012; Leeds Art Gallery, 2012; Carré d’Art, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Nîmes, 2002; ICA, London, 1993-94 and Kunsthalle Basel, 1992.

Public group shows include: Donation Florence et Daniel Guerlain, Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2013-14; Plastic Culture: Legacies of Pop 1986 – 2008, Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston; The Exchange, Penzance; Bradford 1 Gallery, Bradford, 2009-2010; Classified: Contemporary British Art from Tate Collection, Tate Britain, 2009; Pictograms , Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, 2006; Fiction@Love, Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, 2006; Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy of Arts, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1997-2000; Nuevas Abstracciones, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 1996; Unbound, Hayward Gallery, London, 1994; Turner Prize Exhibition 1991, Tate Gallery, 1991; Freeze, London Docklands, 1988.

Rae’s work is held in public and private collections worldwide including Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery; Carré d’Art - Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes, France; Corcoran Galleryof Art, Washington, D.C.; Fond National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; Fondation - Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; Southampton City Art Gallery; Tate Collection; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Warwick University Art Collection.

Dan Perfect (b. 1965, London) studied at Chelsea School of Art, London, 1981-83, and St Martins School of Art, London, 1983-86. Solo exhibitions have included Dæmonology, Karsten Schubert Gallery, London, 2010; Dan Perfect: Paintings, Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2008; Paintings and Drawings, Road Agent, Dallas, 2008; Dan Perfect, One in the Other, London, 2006.

His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Death to the Fascist Insect that Preys on the Life of the People, Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, 2001; Beck’s Futures, ICA, London, 2002; traveled to CCA, Glasgow and Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield, 2002; Exploring Landscape: Eight Views from Britain, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, 2003; Recent Acquisitions, Southampton City Art Gallery, 2005; Newspeak: British Art Now, Saatchi Gallery, London, 2010; traveled to Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2011; New Wave: British Art Today, Etemad Gallery, Dubai, 2011; John Moores Painting Prize 2012, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and London Twelve, City Gallery Prague, Czech Republic, 2012.

His work is represented in many private and public collections including the Government Art Collection, Southampton City Art Gallery, David Roberts Foundation, Goss Michael Foundation, Simmons and Simmons Collection and the Saatchi Collection.