Rebecca Salter , is a British abstract artist who lives and works in London. Previously elected Keeper in 2017, she was elected as the first female President of the Royal Academy of Arts in London on 10 December 2019. Formerly a ceramicist, she is best known as painter and printmaker. Salter specialises in woodblock printing, combining Western and Eastern traditions. She has written two books on Japanese wood blocks: Japanese Woodblock and Japanese Popular Prints: From Votive Slips to Playing Cards.
Education
Rebecca Salter trained at Bristol Polytechnic, graduating in 1977. According to Gillian Forrestor, George Rainer, Salter's teacher at Bristol, motivated his students to not be confined to their desired mediums, but to use the opportunity of university to experiment. Salter enjoyed the freedom to engage with mixed medias and practices, which has become an integral part of her ongoing practice. In 1979, Salter received a Leverhulme Scholarship enabling her to became a research student at Kyoto City University of Arts in Japan until 1981. She studied traditional Japanese woodblock printing with professor Kurosaki Akira.
Work
Salter lived and worked in Japan from 1979 to 1985. This move changed the nature of her work significantly, having an impact not only on her palette, but her artistic practice also. She began working more with two-dimensional works, creating pieces that complicate the relationship between painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture. Her earliest, Untitled B119, is a suit of woodblock prints on paper, stained with persimmon juice, to give the impression of age, reminiscent of Japanese wab. She also studied calligraphy in the evenings, which she learnt was more than merely drawing lines but about dynamic movement. Arriving back in London, in 1985, Salter took up painting on canvas. Though she was no longer a ceramicist, she continued to view her practice as “making an object” rather than a surface. Her time in Japan continued to prevail through this new medium. Calligraphic traditions can be seen through the lines in Untitled RR21, which Sadako Okhi suggests is reminiscent of a lily pond by Monet, where the lilies have been replaced by killifish. She won the Pollock-Krasner Foundation award in 1995 and the Cheltenham Open Drawing award in 1997. In 2009, Salter worked on the refurbishment of St George's Hospital in Tooting, south London, in collaboration with architects Gibberd. The refurbishment demonstrated her engagement with the Japanese concepts of space and her belief in the therapeutic value of art. Salter said: Salter has twice been artist in residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Connecticut, where she envisaged her work would be a tribute to Josef Albers’ practice. Salter exhibits regularly in London, and internationally. In 2011, she had her first major museum retrospective, Into the light of things, at the Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut. It was more than a conventional retrospective of a single artist's work; it was a sustained investigation of the centrality of drawing to art making and of the notion of a dialogue between Eastern and Western aesthetics, artistic practice, and architecture. Although Salter's influence from her travels are clear, Salter prefers not to travel needlessly to reserve more time for working in her studio. Despite this, Salter does believe that artists should be able to work in any environment.
In 2014, Salter was elected as a Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts in London. In 2017, she was elected as Keeper of the Royal Academy, with the responsibility of guiding the RA Schools. She was elected as the first female President of the Royal Academy on 10 December 2019. She will continue to hold the position of Keeper until an election is held to appoint a new Keeper of the RA Schools in 2020.
Selected exhibitions
Multiple Thoughts: Artists Make Prints, The Keeper's House, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK, 2018 One Year Anniversary Show, Galerie Pugliese Levi, Berlin, Germany, 2018 Memories Arrested in Space, The Italian Cultural Institute of London and ARTUNER.com, 2018 The Realm of Objects and Ideas , ARTUNER.com, 2018 In Praise of Shadows , Cassina Projects, NYC and ARTUNER.com, 2017
Into the Light of Things , Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut, USA, 2011
Pale Remembered , Beardsmore Gallery, London, UK, 2009
The Unguiet Gaze , Howard Scott Gallery, New York, USA, 2007
Bliss of Solitude , Beardsmore Gallery, London, UK, 2006
