In View: Rebecca Salter at Gainsborough’s House is the first solo museum show in the UK dedicated to the work of the British abstract artist Rebecca Salter, President of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and by association, President of Gainsborough’s House.
Having formally studied traditional Japanese woodblock printing in Kyoto for six years, Rebecca Salter, the first woman President of the Royal Academy, is renowned as a painter whose work combines Western and Eastern traditions.
The exhibition, organised in collaboration with the writer and art critic Thomas Marks, presents her practice in a curated selection of large-scale paintings on display in the new Sudbury Gallery at Gainsborough’s House. Rooted in Japanese modes of thought and art making, the exhibition’s themes of Drawing to Painting, Repetition and Attention, Surface and Depth provide entry points into Salter’s careful, meditative mode of abstraction.
In the historic building at Gainsborough’s House, Rebecca Salter couples her ink drawings and watercolours, as well as one sculpture, with twelve works from the museum’s collection, by Gainsborough, Cedric Morris and Rembrandt, among others. Each pairing generates fresh insight into the historical work while opening up perspectives on Salter’s own experimental processes.
Gainsborough’s House is the childhood home of, and now an international centre for, Thomas Gainsborough RA (1727–88). One of the great figures of British and global art history, he was renowned not only for his advancement of portraiture but also for being one of the founders of the British School of landscape painting. In 2019 Gainsborough’s House commenced a £10m building project, supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund. On 21 November 2022, the museum re-opened to the public after a transformational refurbishment, which included introducing three new exhibition spaces to accompany the original Grade I listed building. The museum is now the largest gallery in Suffolk.
The permanent collection at Gainsborough’s House is the most comprehensive collection of Thomas Gainsborough’s artwork within a single setting anywhere in the world, encompassing paintings from across his whole career, including early portraits and landscapes painted in Suffolk during the 1750s, such as Wooded Landscape with Herdsman Seated (1746-1747), Peter Darnell Muilman, Charles Crockatt and William Keable in a Landscape (1750) and Mrs Mary Cobbold and Miss Cobbold with a Lamb and a Ewe (1752) to later works from his Bath and London periods of the 1760s, 70s and 80s. The collection of works on paper includes drawings by Gainsborough and his contemporaries, as well as prints by or after Gainsborough and other eighteenth-century artists, providing a valuable framework for interpreting Gainsborough’s art in its historical context.
In View: Rebecca Salter at Gainsborough’s House, November 2023 – March 10th, 2024 gainsborough.org
About
Rebecca Salter studied at Bristol Polytechnic and then at Kyoto City University of the Arts in Japan, where she lived for six years. While living in Kyoto, Salter studied traditional Japanese woodblock printing with Professor Kurosaki Akira and has since written two books on the subject. Her interest in printmaking is combined with her main practice in painting. Until 2016 she was Associate Lecturer on the MA Printmaking Course at Camberwell College of Art, University of the Arts, London.
Salter exhibits regularly in London and internationally, and in 2011 she had a major retrospective into the light of things at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut. A monograph was published to coincide with the show. An accompanying exhibition at Yale University Art Gallery explored links between Western artists and Japan. She has also been artist in residence twice (2003 and 2011) at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Connecticut. Salter has undertaken several architectural commissions including 15 Sackville Street, London W1, St George’s Hospital, Tooting and NGS Macmillan Cancer Unit, Chesterfield Royal Hospital. She has work in many private and public collections including Tate, British Museum, Yale Center for British Art and Yale University Art Gallery.
Salter was elected as a Royal Academician to the category of Printmaker in December 2014 and, in June 2017, was elected as the Keeper of the Royal Academy. On 10th December 2019 she was elected the 27th President of the Royal Academy of Arts and became the first female President since the Academy was founded in 1768. @rsalterra
Thomas Marks was editor of Apollo from 2013–21. During his editorship, he worked to expand the reach and remit of the magazine, launching the Apollo website as a platform that publishes daily content, and establishing the Apollo 40 Under 40 initiative to celebrate innovation in the art and museum sectors. He has contributed numerous features and profiles to the magazine, often focusing on Italian art and museums, and continues to write a monthly column on the rapport between art and food.
Marks holds an MA in English literature from Pembroke College, Cambridge, and an MSt and DPhil from Magdalen College, Oxford. His doctoral research explored the architectural contexts and commentary of 19th-century British poetry, teasing out the relationship between architectural and poetic form from Wordsworth’s late work to the verse of Thomas Hardy.
He has contributed to numerous publications, among them Prospect, Literary Review and the Times Literary Supplement, and has written and lectured widely on historical and contemporary art, and on art publishing. With a particular interest in contemporary painting, he has published catalogue essays on artists including Caroline Walker and Nick Goss. He was a founding editor of The Junket, an online magazine for essays, fiction and poetry that ran from 2011–16.
Marks is a trustee of Art UK, the cultural education charity that exists to open up the UK’s public art collections to global audiences through digitisation and storytelling. Through student mentoring and lectures, he also supports Art History Link-Up, a charity that offers EPQ and A-level qualifications in history of art to students in the state education sector. @tomwmarks1
