CV / Reviews

Rebecca Salter

1977
Graduated from Bristol Polytechnic
Faculty of Art and Design

1979 – 81
Research student, Kyoto City University of Arts, Japan
(Leverhulme Scholarship)

1981 – 85
Living and working in Japan

1985 –
Living and working in London

1995
Pollock-Krasner Foundation award

1996 - 2016
Associate Lecturer, MA Visual Arts, Camberwell College of Arts

2001
Published Japanese Woodblock Printing,
A&C Black/University of Hawaii

2002 – 2011
Research Fellow, Camberwell College of Arts

2003
Artist in Residence, Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Connecticut
Pollock-Krasner Foundation award

2006
Published Japanese Popular Prints
A&C Black/Univ of Hawaii

2011
Artist in Residence, Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Connecticut

2014
Residency, Lofoten, Norway
Elected to Royal Academy of Arts

2017
Elected Keeper of the Royal Academy of Arts

2019
Elected President of the Royal Academy of Arts

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2021
Artuner at Gurr Johns, London

2018
Gallery Rin, Tokyo
Art Office Ozasa, Kyoto

2016
Paintings, Drawings, Prints, Beardsmore Gallery, London

2015
First Light, Howard Scott Gallery, New York
Along These Lines, Beardsmore Gallery, London

2013
Beyond, Beardsmore Gallery, London

2011
into the light of things: Rebecca Salter 1981-2010, Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut
Howard Scott Gallery, New York
Drawn, Beardsmore Gallery, London

2009
Pale Remembered, Beardsmore Gallery, London

2007
The Unquiet Gaze, Howard Scott Gallery, New York

2006
Bliss of Solitude, Beardsmore Gallery, London

2004
Line, Fosterart, London
Inner Eye, Howard Scott Gallery, New York

2002
Hirschl Contemporary Art, London

2001
Galerie Michael Sturm, Stuttgart
Galerie Pousse (Ichikawa), Tokyo
Gallery Sowaka, Kyoto
Howard Scott Gallery, New York
Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth

2000
Jill George Gallery, London

1999
Galerie Michael Sturm, Stuttgart
(with Thomas Ruppel)
Feichtner & Mizrahi, Vienna
M-13/Howard Scott Gallery, New York

1998
Jill George Gallery, London
Galerie Pousse (Ichikawa), Tokyo

1997
M-13/Howard Scott Gallery, New York

1996
Jill George Gallery, London

1994
Jill George Gallery, London

1993
Ishiyacho Gallery, Kyoto

1992
Quay Arts Centre, Isle of Wight
Ichikawa Gallery, Tokyo

1990
Ichikawa Gallery, Tokyo (with UK ’90 Festival)

1987
Curwen Gallery, London

1986
Miller/Brown Gallery, San Francisco

1985
CDR Fine Art, London

1984
Gallery Maronie, Kyoto
Gallery Te, Tokyo
Curwen Gallery, London

1983
Gallery Maronie, Kyoto
Gallery Suzuki, Kyoto (in conjunction with the
International Paper Conference)

1982
Amano Gallery, Osaka

1981
Gallery Maronie, Kyoto

Selected Group Exhibitions

2021
Galerie Sturm & Schober, Vienna
Suite. Zeichnung ’21, Galerie Michael Sturm, Stuttgart
Galerie Pugliese Levi, Berlin
New Forces Knocking, Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, London

2020
The Faraway Nearby, Rabley Gallery, UK

2019
Galerie Pugliese Levi, Berlin

2018
Galerie Pugliese Levi, Berlin
Memories Arrested in Space, Italian Cultural Institute, London

2017
In Praise of Shadows, Cassina Projects/Artuner, New York

2016
Impression on the Spirit, Howard Scott Gallery, New York

2014
New Works on Paper (with Gianfranco Foschino)
Galerie Michael Sturm, Stuttgart

2013
The Opposite Gaze, Howard Scott Gallery, New York

2012
International Print Exhibition UK/Japan, Kyoto, Kita Kyushu
Prints Tokyo 2012

2011
Watercolour, Tate
Rebecca Salter and Japan, Yale University Art Gallery
What If It’s All True? What Then?, Mummery and Schnelle, London
microwave eight, Josee Bienvenue Gallery, New York
40 Artists : 80 Drawings, Burton Art Gallery and Museum, Bideford, Devon

2010
25 Years, Howard Scott Gallery, New York

2009
40 Artists-80 Drawings, The Drawing Gallery, UK
Contemporary Prints, The Drawing Gallery, UK
40 Artists-40 Drawings, Victoria and Albert Museum

2008
Drawing into Painting into Drawing, The Drawing Gallery, UK
Chromophobia, OK Harris, New York

2007
Fils de..., Plouec de Trieux, France

2006
White II, Howard Scott Gallery, New York
Drawing, Galerie Michael Sturm, Stuttgart
Surface Tensions, Jagged Art, London
To the Edge, Beardsmore Gallery, London
16 Artists/32 Drawings, The Drawing Gallery, London
Drawing Inspiration, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Cumbria
Individual Poetries, Howard Scott Gallery, New York
Drawing Breath, London; Bristol; Aberdeen; Sydney; Singapore

2005
Howard Scott Gallery, New York
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
40 Artists-40 Drawings, The Drawing Gallery, London

2004
Sublime Present, Musashino Art University, Tokyo; Nishio City, Aichi

2003
Untitled: work on paper, Hirschl Contemporary Art, London
Atlantic, Fosterart, London
20x5 Drawings, Eagle Gallery, London
Eight + one, Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, Northampton

2002
Working the Grid, Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, USA
Works on Paper, Howard Scott Gallery, New York
Galerie Michael Sturm, Stuttgart

2001
London Prints, Montana State University, USA

2000
Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo, NY, USA

1999
Relief Prints, Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury
Preview, M-13/Howard Scott Gallery, New York

1998
5 artists, M-13/Howard Scott Gallery, New York
Abstraction, M-13/Howard Scott Gallery, New York

1997
12 British Artists, NORD/LB Forum, Hanover
Cheltenham Open Drawing 1997 (Prizewinner)

1996
White, M13/Howard Scott Gallery, New York
Cheltenham Open Drawing 1996

1995
From Picasso to Woodrow, Tate Gallery, London
Cabinet Art, Jason & Rhodes Gallery, London

1994
Recent Prints, Jill George Gallery

1993
Collographs and Monoprints, Eagle Gallery, London
Salama Caro Gallery, London

1992
Women Critics choose Women Artists, Bruton Street Gallery, London

1991
Cleveland Drawing Biennale, UK

1990
Curwen Gallery, London
Runkel-Hue-Williams, London
A View of the New, Royal Over-Seas League (prizewinner)

1989
Critic’s Space, Air Gallery, London
Drawing ’89, Gallery Maronie, Kyoto/Wacoal Art Space, Tokyo

1988
Presentation ’88, Curwen Gallery, London
Six Artists on Paper, Oxford Gallery, Oxford

1987
Eight by Eight, Curwen Gallery, London

1985
Curwen Gallery, London

1984
Curwen Gallery, London
Gallery Humanite, Nagoya

1983
Frechen Kunstverein, Germany (prizewinner)
Cleveland Drawing Biennale, UK (prizewinner)
World Print Council IV, San Francisco (purchase prize)

1982
Vallauris Ceramics Biennale, France (prizewinner)
Miller/Brown Gallery, San Francisco

1980
Gallery Soiree, Kyoto
Gallery Washio, Tokyo

1977
Qualifications, Midland Group, Nottingham
Gallery Two, Cheltenham

Selected Collections

UK
Tate Gallery
The British Museum
Victoria and Albert Museum
The British Council
Government Art Collection
Cambridge Institute for Medical Research
Linklaters, London
The British Land Company PLC

Germany
Frechen Kunstverein, Germany
Graphotek, Stadtbucherei, Stuttgart

USA
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Portland Museum of Modern Art
Library of Congress, Washington DC
World Print Council, San Francisco
JP Morgan, New York

Selected Commissions

United Airlines
EPR Architects
St George’s Hospital, London
Guy’s Hospital, London
Vale Practice, London
9-15 Sackville Street, Piccadilly, London

Video

2021
Sotheby's
Robert Sainsbury Lecture 2021, University of East Anglia

2020
Yale Center for British Art

2018
Drawing Now

2017
Drawing

2015
Japanese Woodblock

Podcasts

2018
Countercurrent: Conversations with Professor Roger Kneebone
TOAST Podcast

2013
V&A Podcast - Women Artists

Selected Reviews and Articles

Studio International
While her art school peers were looking to London and New York, Rebecca Salter (b1955, Sussex) had her sights set on Japan, a country that has had a profound influence on her work. Travelling to Kyoto on a scholarship in 1979, she spent six years immersed in Japan’s art and culture, learning traditional techniques such as the ancient art of woodblock printing...
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The Telegraph
The first female president of the Royal Academy discusses the financial crisis in British Culture, and how the RA will tackle the new normal. Just weeks after the Royal Academy of Arts closed in March, weeds began shouldering up between the courtyard flagstones...
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The Telegraph
'People think it’s all men in three-piece tweed suits,’ says Christopher Le Brun, the painter and sculptor who is president of the Royal Academy of Arts, which this year celebrates its 250th anniversary. ‘But this place is full of emotion. Lashings of it.'...
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Artuner
Although Rebecca Salter's six years in Japan made an undeniable impression on her work, her three month residency in 2003 at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, in Bethany, has also had a significant impact. According to Gillian Forrestor, the Yale Centre for British Art’s curator of prints and drawings, “Salter had envisaged that her work at Bethany might take the form of homage to Josef Albers’ practice.”...
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Artuner
Rebecca Salter’s, RA work is part of ARTUNER’s fourth curated exhibition at Cassina Projects in New York, which opened May 3rd 2017 in the Chelsea space. Before the inauguration of the show we met with Rebecca in her London studio to discuss her practice, the impact Japanese culture has had on her work, and the importance of ’empty space’....
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Artuner
Though “there is no doubt in [her] mind that [her] professional career as an artist is built on Japanese foundations,” Rebecca Salter is very much a modern British Romantic. Her fascination with Japan is not driven by a desire to experience the ‘otherness’ expounded by Edward Said in his seminal book, Orientalism, but rather by an attempt to create a distinctive hybridity that profoundly engages with the conception and representation of landscape that is so central to both traditions...
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Dr Reinhard Ermen, Kunstforum International Bd 239 April – May 2016
Kollektiv erregte Mikroelemente üben sich in Schwarmintelligenz, Bausteine definieren sich im Kollektiv, Strukturfelder sind zu sehen. Bei Rebecca Salter herrscht ein Ostinato, das vielleicht von tiefer liegenden Magnetkräften kanalisiert wird; so jedenfalls ließe sich der Eindruck von diesen durchgearbeiteten Territorien beschreiben, deren Ordnung sich letztlich dem kontrollierenden Nachrechnen entzieht...
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New York Times
What does it mean, in the 21st century, for a Western artist to borrow heavily from aesthetic traditions of the East? It’s a question that hovers around the career retrospective “Rebecca Salter: Into the Light of Things” at the Yale Center for British Art and the pendant show “Rebecca Salter and Japan” at the Yale University Art Gallery...
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Fiona Robinson Writings on Art
Rebecca Salter’s beautiful contemplative work stays with the viewer long after they have left the physical object behind. Her labour intensive process retains that element of craftsmanship, which she acquired during her time in Japan at a formative stage in her career. Her layering of marks, dashes, washes is worked on, removed, covered, building up residues of light, tone and line which fuse and meld into a quality of other-worldliness which is both ethereal and adamantine. Her work, frequently informed by a grid-like structure, has always been dependent on observation, sometimes leaving a horizontality which suggests the meeting of land and sky, at others and this seems more present in some of her most recent work, a strong verticality. In 2003 Salter completed a three-month Residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut and the work that she is currently doing has its genesis in that experience...
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Weekend, Yale Daily News
British artist Rebecca Salter is best known for work which gives us a fresh perspective on the traditional Japanese aesthetic. Her new retrospective opening at the Yale Center for British Art, “into the light of things,” presents about 150 works of hers from 1981 until the present. In the heart of the museum, surrounded by her soft and meticulously detailed paintings, WEEKEND spoke to Salter about her influences, her work and how she hopes visitors will experience her art...
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The Day
At first glance, there is nothing tying together the two, centuries-apart shows at Yale Center for British Art (YCBA), Thomas Lawrence: Regency, Power and Brilliance and "into the light of things": Rebecca Salter, works 1981-2010, except that they are both retrospectives of British artists...
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The Arts Paper
Each year, visual artist Rebecca Salter spends a week in the Lake District of northwestern England, a locale that boasts beautiful landscapes and “has the most atrocious weather.” Salter goes there to draw, filling one sketchbook during the course of an annual visit. When she returns to her London home and studio, Salter puts the sketchbook she’s just filled away, never to look to those drawings as foundations for new works...
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Yale Alumni Magazine
In 1979, the British abstract artist Rebecca Salter made her first trip to Japan. There she found a set of aesthetic principles and artistic techniques that matched her own. Inspired by artists who used strong lines and subtle colors, she also became enamored of traditional Japanese art forms, including calligraphy and block printing...
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Anna Mozynska Catalogue Introduction, Beardsmore Gallery, London Nov - Dec 2006
Rebecca Salter's recent work conveys as ever a quietness and repose that provides welcome respite to what she has expressively referred to as our 'digitally-rich and time-poor culture'. In the muted colour cadences and detailed surfaces there is encouragement to linger, absorb and to ponder difference. New materials (the use of aluminium as a support) and new techniques (involving the partial but deliberate rubbing out of the painted surface) are brought to bear creating subtle shifts and new departures from earlier practice. In essence however, the main shift in this body of work lies in its abstracted view of nature or of an emotion stemming from it, which is reflected upon later...
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Nicholas Fox Weber Catalogue Introduction Howard Scott Gallery New York 2004
"It was spring. One morning Cosimo saw the air vibrating with a sound he had never heard, a buzz growing at times almost into a roar, and a curtain of what looked like hail, which instead of falling was moving in a horizontal direction and turning and twisting slowly around, but following a kind of denser column. It was a great mass of bees; and around was greenery and flowers and sun."
That description is from Italo Calvinos's magnificent The Baron in the Trees, his tale of an eighteenth-century Italian aristocrat who escapes his indoor world and flees to a " thick and impenetrable" wood, living in the treetops, viewing the world from a sea of "thick greenery."...
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Charlotte Mullins Catalogue Introduction Hirschl Contemporay Art, London 2002
'To see a world in a grain of sand
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour'

From William Blake Auguries of Innocence.
Rebecca Salter's paintings are paradoxes. They appear tranquil, yet are full of movement; they seem monochrome but are made up of myriad colours; they have delicate surfaces woven in skeins of acrylic and ink yet your eye plunges through into unfathomable depths. They appear empty, but rarely are paintings so full. ...
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Catalogue Introduction Jill George Gallery, London by Anna Moszynska August 2000
'The bamboo-shadows move over the stone steps
as if to sweep them, but no dust is stirred;
The moon is reflected deep in the pool, but the
Water shows no trace of its penetration' (Zendo poem)

There is an oriental quality to Rebecca Salter's paintings, which as in the case of a Japanese poem, invites quiet contemplation. What at first appears almost empty (the canvas expunged of external references) is actually surprisingly full. Closely observed, the surfaces reveal a wealth of incident. A morass of intricate lines, invisible to the camera, incise and texture the surface, not unlike the raked rills of gravel in a Zen garden. Sequences of drips, suggesting the traced patterns left by the trajectory of a shower...
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Illusory Images of Universal Order by Andrew Lambirth Howard Scott M-13 Gallery, New York, 1999.
Catalogue introduction
There is a more pronounced architectural mood to these new paintings by Rebecca Salter than anything yet to have appeared in her work. It may well be that previous pictures have aspired to the condition of architecture, 'frozen music' as Schelling put it, but this group has attained a new monumentality without dispensing with the potential for movement so crucial to Salter's aims. Somehow what we see depicted...
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Paintings, drawings and prints at the Jill George Gallery, London 1998 catalogue introduction by Norbert Lynton
A few years ago Rebecca Salter sent a painting to Liverpool to win a place in the exhibition and perhaps a prize in the John Moores Liverpool competition. It was unwrapped, looked at by the jury, rejected and re-wrapped. Someone wrote 'Blank Canvas' on the package. Salter's paintings are not blank canvases. They are densely worked over many hours, layer over layer...
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Review of exhibition at the M-13 Gallery, New York by Johnson New York Times, October 17 1997
The works of the English painter Rebecca Salter emit a soothing, meditative hum. Over neat grids of glued-on rectangles, Ms Salter works up dense but subtle fields of mark-making, creating a feeling of airy but quiet flux. Each picture is a diptych, which gives it an iconic presence and the suggestion of some kind of cosmic import.

What the Wild Bees Know by Andrew Lambirth Royal Academy Magazine, August 1996
The buzz is out about Rebecca Salter. Actually it is more of a low steady hum but all the more reassuring for being constant. Like the noise from a productive hive, one is at once reminded that bees were judged by the ancients to be disseminators of knowledge. Salter (born 1955) is an artist of the utmost integrity and distinction. Long popular in Japan and America, she is yet to be widely acclaimed in this country. Her new show at Jill George should go a long way to remedy previous neglect, for beside new subtly-modulated...
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Paintings and works on paper at Jill George Gallery, London 1996 catalogue introduction by Andrew Lambirth
In her new work Rebecca Salter has slipped 'the quiet anchor of the grid' freeing her work for a sea-change. The one inch squares have disappeared, as has the covert reference to landscape, but the exceptional poise remains. Salter has created a species of non-referential art to convey purely visual experience. Yet these paintings, drawings and prints are by no means mechanical or inhuman. They are not implacably geometric or minimal. They have by association an underlying organic identity, tinged with metaphysics, which makes them very attractive...
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Meditations on Silence by Sister Wendy Beckett Dorling Kindersely 1995
Silence is a paradox, intensely 'there' and, with equal intensity, 'not there'. The passivity of silence is hard to explain, since in one respect it is intensely active. We hold ourselves in a condition of surrender. We choose not to initiate, nor to cooperate with our mental processes. Yet from this passivity arises creativity. This mysterious liberation from all commonplace worldly demands is exemplified in Rebecca Salter's abstractions, which have been compared to gazing at a waterfall. Salter seems as if to have painted silence itself: the work is both alive and moving, and yet still, so that the eye wanders, absorbed and yet patternless, through and among the shapes before us. There is nothing to say, nothing even to experience in any words that sound impressive, yet the looking never wearies. This is a rough image, in its very imagelessness, of the bliss of silence.

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