Hart Gallery

• About Anne Desmet
• Anne Desmet Biography
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Anne Desmet RA RE RWA

Anne Desmet RE was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) at its latest election meeting on Thursday 26th May 2011. Elected into the category of Engravers, Printmakers and Draughtsmen, her election follows hot on the heels of Turner prizewinner Grayson Perry RA’s election into the same category in March. On hearing the news, Desmet said: ‘I’m stunned, honoured and absolutely delighted. As a wood engraver – an art form rather rarely in the public eye – it’s a great accolade. I’ve shown in the RA Summer Exhibition almost every year for the last 20 years but, even so, this news is an unexpected and wonderful surprise and I hope I will prove worthy of the honour.’

Born in Liverpool, in 1964, Desmet’s childhood and teenage years were punctuated by frequent stays in hospital for a series of surgical procedures to correct a congenital dislocation of her left hip. To occupy her time, she spent the long months in hospital sketching whatever she could see from her bed – and thus began her earliest interest in making art. In 1983, beginning her BFA in Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Drawing at Oxford University, she had barely recovered from a final significant operation that had kept her in hospital for over six months. Gaining strength and confidence, she went on to gain a Postgraduate Diploma in Printmaking at Central School of Art and Design, London (1988), and an MA (Oxon) in 1991. ‘The real turning point in my career’ she says, ‘was winning a Rome Scholarship in Printmaking in 1989. That gave me a year living and working at the British School in Rome. While I was there, I developed an abiding interest in architecture and its potential to evoke tantalizing memories of civilizations stretching back centuries, but also speaking of present and future lives. Also, I first began my experiments with printed collage in Rome. Collage has been the mainstay of my art ever since and is perhaps the area in which I have helped to bring a new direction to the historic medium of wood engraving.’ 

Desmet has had numerous solo shows in London at Duncan Campbell Fine Art, South Kensington (1990-2002) and at Hart Gallery, Islington (2003-current). Her first retrospective exhibition, Anne Desmet: Towers and Transformations, opened at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in 1998 and her second, Anne Desmet – Urban Evolution, was launched at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, in 2008. Both exhibitions went on to tour other UK museums and public galleries for several years. Her collages also featured in the British Museum’s outstanding Babylon: Myth and Reality exhibition. Her works are in numerous public and private collections worldwide and, since 1987, she has won 30 awards and prizes including, last year, the LOPF Award for ‘best print in any medium’ at the RA Summer Exhibition. Her latest body of work: Anne Desmet – Olympic Metamorphoses, concerning the developing Olympic site near her home in Hackney, was shown to great acclaim at Hart Gallery in November. Selected highlights will be shown concurrently at several UK public galleries during the Olympic Games next year.
Desmet is co-author, with Jim Anderson, of bestselling book (published by A&C Black Ltd): ‘Handmade Prints – An Introduction to Printmaking without a Press’ (2000, reprinted three times) and author of ‘Primary Prints – Creative Printmaking in the Classroom’ (2010). She is also editor (since 1998) of ‘Printmaking Today’ – the quarterly magazine of international graphic art. She lives in London with her husband, artist Roy Willingham ARE, and their two children.