Rebecca Fortnum, solo exhibition.

The 40 works featured in this solo exhibition were made in response to research questions regarding the boundaries between fine art and the decorative, as well as between drawing and painting.

It included two autonomous bodies of work. The Rococo series examined earlier critical accusations of decorativeness and the uncanny nature of symmetry. It attempts to explore the emotional resonances of the purely decorative in order to ask questions about its communicative powers.

The second series of work entitled lyric, incorporates the disjointed lyrics of popular songs into the works' surfaces and continues an earlier enquiry about the nature of looking and reading visual works.

Rebecca Fortnum read English at Corpus Christi College, Oxford before gaining an MFA from Newcastle University and taking up a fellowship at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, USA.

With a distinguished history of teaching in the arts, Rebecca Fortnum has been a Visiting Fellow in Painting at Plymouth University and at Winchester School of Art; Visiting Artist at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Senior Lecturer at Norwich School of Art and Wimbledon School of Art; and Associate Lecturer at Bath Spa University and Central St Martins School of Art. She is currently Senior Lecturer at Camberwell College of Art, University of the Arts, London and Research Fellow at the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University.

She has received numerous awards throughout her career as a visual artist, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the British Council, the Arts Council of England, the British School in Rome and the Art and Humanities Research Council. She has exhibited widely including solo shows at the Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Spacex Gallery, Exeter, The Winchester Gallery, Kapil Jariwala Gallery, London, Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham, The Drawing Gallery, London and Gallery 33, Berlin; her work has been shown in group shows in New York, Maine, Budapest, Salzburg, Marseilles and Gdansk as well as numerous UK exhibitions. Recent group shows include 'Fluent: painting and words' (2002) at Centenary Gallery, London and 'Unframed: the politics and practices of women's contemporary painting' at Standpoint Gallery, London in 2004. Artist, writer, curator and researcher, she has contributed to various conferences, journals, magazines and books and was instrumental in founding the artist run spaces Cubitt Gallery and Gasworks Gallery in London.