JUDE RAE

Rae’s has exhibited widely in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, including at the Australian National University Drill Hall Gallery, Two Rooms in Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland, The Commercial in Sydney, and Philip Bacon Galleries in Brisbane.

Early life and career

Born in Sydney in 1956, Rae studied at the Julian Ashton Art School and the University of Sydney, later completing further studies at the University of New South Wales and the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. She began exhibiting in the 1980s, becoming associated with a precise, materially attentive form of representational painting grounded in close observation. A move to Aotearoa New Zealand in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during which she directed South Island Art Projects in Ōtautahi / Christchurch (a precursor to The Physics Room), proved pivotal, giving her space to consolidate her approach away from the Australian scene and introducing her to the work of Gordon Walters and Colin McCahon.

Rae later returned to Sydney, where she continues to live and work while exhibiting regularly across Australia and New Zealand and teaching, including a significant period at the National Art School. Teaching has reinforced her focus on the technical and perceptual challenges of translating three-dimensional experience into two-dimensional form, a central concern in her studio practice.

Works, methods and themes

Rae is best known for still life paintings in which modest objects—Bakelite bowls, jars, glass vessels, fabrics, boxes, gas bottles, and other studio finds—are arranged on tables in tightly controlled environments. The compositions typically use a restricted palette, shallow depth of field, and frontal, eye-level viewpoint, encouraging viewers to dwell on relationships between line, plane, light, and volume rather than narrative content. Since the late 1990s she has numbered her works (for example, SL481, 2023), a strategy that deflects symbolic readings and foregrounds the act of looking.

A key theme is the tension between object and image, and between illusionistic space and the material fact of paint on canvas. Her paintings carefully model light, shadow, and surface from a consistent light source, while allowing their construction to remain visible through underpainting, exposed canvas edges, and drips or traces of process. In the Ocula interview “Jude Rae on Thinking through Visual Experience,” she describes drawing and painting as “thinking/feeling through visual experience rather than representing it,” framing painting as a way of testing how perception operates.

Alongside still lifes, Rae has developed interiors and architectural paintings that explore measured light, spatial recession, and the way built environments frame experience, extending her interest in phenomenology into larger, often sparsely occupied or empty spaces. Portraiture forms another important strand; her portraits, recognised by major prizes, apply the same patient observation and sensitivity to light and atmosphere to human sitters. She has also produced a small number of video works, notably a 2013 series of three linked pieces that use narrow depth of field and slow shifts of focus to extend the temporal dimension of viewing, aligning with the contemplative concerns of her painting.

Recent exhibitions and recognition

Rae has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Jude Rae: A Space of Measured Light at the Australian National University Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra (2017). She has held multiple solo shows at Two Rooms in Auckland, and exhibits regularly with The Commercial in Sydney and Philip Bacon Galleries in Brisbane. Her work has been recognised through residencies in France, Italy, and Aotearoa New Zealand, and she has taught at art schools including the University of Auckland, the Australian National University, and, most recently, the National Art School in Sydney.

In 2005 and 2008, Rae won the Portia Geach Memorial Award for Portraiture, and she was a finalist in the Archibald Prize in 2014, receiving Highly Commended in 2019, 2021, and 2022. Further recognition includes the Bulgari Art Award at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2016) and the Wynne Prize (2025). In 2021, the National Gallery of Australia included Rae in the landmark exhibition Know My Name, a major survey of Australian women artists, and her work is held in major public and private collections in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and the USA.

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Ocula | 2026