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The Royal Academy Schools is delighted to announce the appointment of new professors.
The professorships include The Eranda Professor of Drawing, previously held by Ian McKeever RA, The Professor of Painting, previously held by the late John Hoyland RA, The Professor of Sculpture, previously held by Ivor Abrahams RA and The Professor of Perspective, previously held by Ken Howard RA.
Professor of Perspective, Humphrey Ocean RA
Humphrey Ocean was born in Sussex in 1951 and went to art schools in Tunbridge Wells, Brighton and Canterbury. From 1971 to 1973 he was bass player with Kilburn and the Highroads and was elected a Royal Academician in 2004. His work is in the British Council Collection, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Imperial War Museum, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, National Maritime Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum. Exhibitions include Double-Portrait Tate Liverpool 1992, urbasuburba The Whitworth Art Gallery 1997, The Painter's Eye National Portrait Gallery 1999, how's my driving Dulwich Picture Gallery 2003, Humphrey Ocean Perfectly Ordinary Sidney Cooper Gallery, Canterbury Christ Church University 2009, Here and There Jesus College, Cambridge, 2011. A series of new portraits A handbook of modern life will be shown at the National Portrait Gallery in Autumn 2012. He lives and works in London.
The Eranda Professor of Drawing, Tracey Emin RA
Tracey Emin was born in London in 1963, where she now lives and works. Having grown up in Margate, she studied printmaking at Maidstone College of Art before completing studying at the Royal College of Art. Emin is best known for using her life events as inspiration for works ranging from painting, drawing, video and installation, to photography, needlework and sculpture. Emin has exhibited extensively all over the world. In 2008 she held her first major retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, which subsequently toured to Malaga and Bern. In 2007 Emin represented Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale, and was made a Royal Academician, having first exhibited at the Academy ten years earlier in the Sensation exhibition. She has since curated a gallery within the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition.
The Professor of Painting, Fiona Rae RA
Born in Hong Kong in 1963, Rae completed a BA Hons Fine Art degree at Goldsmiths College in 1987. The following year, she participated in Damien Hirst’s Freeze in London’s Docklands, and within four years of graduating, she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize, Tate Gallery, 1991. Rae has exhibited extensively in museums and galleries internationally and her work is held in prestigious public and private collections worldwide. Group shows include: Unbound, Hayward Gallery, London, 1994; Nuevas Abstracciones, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 1996; Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy of Arts, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1997-2000; Pictograms, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, 2006; Fiction@Love, Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, 2006 and Classified: Contemporary Art at Tate Britain, Tate Britain, 2009. Solo exhibitions have included Kunsthalle Basel, 1992; ICA London, 1993-94; and the Carré d’Art, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Nîmes, 2002. Fiona Rae was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2002 and appointed a Tate Artist Trustee between 2005 and 2009. She lives and works in London.
The Professor of Sculpture, Richard Wilson RA
Richard Wilson, born 1953, is one of Britain’s most renowned sculptors. He is internationally celebrated for his interventions in architectural space which draw heavily for their inspiration from the worlds of engineering and construction. Wilson has exhibited widely nationally and internationally for over thirty years and has made major museum exhibitions and public works in countries as diverse as Japan, USA, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Australia and numerous countries throughout Europe. Wilson has also represented Britain in the Sydney, Sao Paulo, Venice Biennials and Yokohama Triennal, was nominated for the Turner Prize on two occasions and was awarded the prestigious DAAD residency in Berlin 1992/3. He was one of a select number of artists invited to create a major public work for The Millennium Dome and the only British artist invited to participate in Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial 2000, Japan. Wilson’s projects have generated universal critical acclaim. Wilson’s seminal installation 20:50, a sea of reflective sump oil, which is permanently installed in the Saatchi Collection, was described as ‘one of the masterpieces of the modern age’ by the art critic Andrew Graham Dixon in the BBC television series The History of British Art. Wilson was in 2004 appointed Visiting Research Professor at the University of East London and Tate Publishing as part of their Tate Modern Artists Book Series, launched in October 2005, Richard Wilson by Simon Morrissey. In 2006 he was elected as a member of the Royal Academy and in 2008 was awarded an Honorary Doctorate at the University of Middlesex.
