ANNE DESMET RA
“I am presenting a body of work representing London’s St Paul’s Cathedral, in wood engraving and laser-cut prints, in an intentionally ambiguous sequence that may evoke the era and blitz spirit of World War Two yet may equally evoke the hopes and anxieties of our own times.
I am also showing my latest sequential wood engraving, “Tower of Angels” (2020). Inspired by the rarely noticed yet captivating plaster angel-decorations high on the walls of the RA’s Gallery 3, it is both a personal response to the pandemic and a fond tribute to my mother, a leading paediatric surgeon from the earliest years of the NHS, who died last year.”
Anne Desmet RA
ANNE DESMET RA
Anne Desmet in her studio
Anne Desmet was born and brought up in Liverpool. She has BFA and MA degrees in Fine Art from Oxford University, a Postgraduate Diploma in Printmaking from Central School of Art, London, and in 2018 she was elected an Honorary Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford University, for ‘distinction in the world of art’.
Desmet exhibits her wood engravings, linocuts and printed collages widely, has won over 40 national and international awards (including a Rome Scholarship in Printmaking; a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, USA; and an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Award, Montreal, Canada) and has works in major public and private collections worldwide. The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, have each purchased significant holdings of her works. Over 30 solo shows include two major museum retrospectives at the Ashmolean (1998) and Whitworth (2008) respectively: each toured UK museums for two years. She had an earlier retrospective at Moscow’s Ex Libris Museum, Russia (1995); and solo exhibitions of recent works at the Holburne Museum, Bath (2017) and Gainsborough’s House Museum, Suffolk (2018).
Desmet is author of seven published books on printmaking and drawing and was editor of Printmaking Today magazine from 1998-2013. Commissions include engravings for the British Museum; National Gallery; British Library; V&A; Balliol and Worcester Colleges, Oxford; Sotheby’s and the Royal Mint.
She is only the third wood engraver ever elected to membership of the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in its 252-year history. She lives and works in London and has recently curated an historic exhibition celebrating 100 years of the art of wood engraving, which was held at the Ashmolean Museum in 2020.
Further work by Desmet can be seen here