Artist-to-Artist: Vanessa Raw Proposed by Tracey Emin

‘Vanessa’s paintings shock me. I’ve never seen anything like them before. They are beautiful and she can really paint’ – Tracey Emin

Presented by Carl Freedman Gallery at Frieze London

Emin writes: ‘I like Vanessa’s work because it’s free and liberating. When I first saw her work I was shocked. I found the subject matter intense but I also found the paintings incredibly beautiful. They were like a happy place, a Shangri-La, other worldly, and seemed to emphasis love. They are unapologetic and pretty radical. She is a woman making images about women. This has a really strong and important place for our society. But I don’t have to read any of these paintings politically, I see them from an emotional perspective, her real and imaginary landscapes with both real and imaginary moments. A world within a world.’

Vanessa Raw

b. 1984, British; lives and works in Margate

 

Portraiture has always been the foundation of Vanessa Raw’s work. In 2022 Raw took a radical new direction with her work, shifting from traditional portraiture tropes to paint imagined, same-sex, intimate scenes of women in confected landscapes. Raw studied for a BA in Fine Art at Loughborough University. In 2022 Raw was selected for a space at TKE Studios in Margate. In 2024 she will have her first major solo show at Carl Freedman Gallery. 

Tracey Emin

b. 1963, British; lives and works between the South of France, London and Margate

Tracey Emin was born in London in 1963, and studied at Maidstone College of Art and the Royal College of Art, London. She represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and was elected a Royal Academician in the same year. In 2011, Emin became the Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and in 2013 Queen Elizabeth II appointed her Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for her contributions to the visual arts.

Further Information

Frieze London takes place concurrently with Frieze Masters from 11–15 October in The Regent’s Park, London.

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_{Main Image: Vanessa Raw, Gonna find you, 2023, oil on linen, 2 × 2.6 m. Photo: Copyright the Artist. Courtesy of the Artist and Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate}