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6 March 2012:
Anne Desmet RA – The Art of Olympic Metamorphoses, By Piz Helena Ormerod

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biography:
Anne Desmet was born in Liverpool, UK, in 1964. She gained a BA & MA at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Printmaking at Central School of Art and Design, London, UK. She has taught wood engraving at the Royal Academy Schools, Ruskin School and Middlesex University; and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers and a Member of the Society of Wood Engravers in 1991. In 2011, she was elected a Member of the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in the category of Engravers, Printmakers and Draughtsmen.
Since 1990, she has exhibited in London's RA Summer Exhibition almost every year. She also shows in numerous selected group shows worldwide. In 1998 her retrospective exhibition, Towers and Transformations, opened at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, before touring to seven other UK museums and galleries, concluding at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, in 1999. The Whitworth Art Gallery in 2008 curated a new retrospective: Anne Desmet - Urban Evolution, which opened in April 2008 and is touring UK museums and galleries until 2010. Since 1987 she has received over 20 major national and international prizes for her work including, in 1989-90, a British School at Rome scholarship in printmaking, a year in which she developed an ongoing interest in architectural subject matter.

Anne is editor of Printmaking Today - the quarterly journal of contemporary international graphic art; and co-author of Handmade Prints - an introduction to creative printmaking without a press, published, in October 2000, by A&C Black (London), Davis (USA) and Haupt (Germany), reprinted in 2003 & 2006. She is also co-editor of Printmakers - the Directory published in 2006 by A&C Black. Other publications featuring her work include: Anne Desmet:Towers and Transformations - catalogue raisonne (Ashmolean Museum, 1998); Private Views: Artists working today (Serpent's Tail, 2004, commissioned by the Arts Council); Wood Engraving and the Woodcut in Britain c.1890-1990 (Barrie & Jenkins, 1994); The Times, Art Review, Art Monthly, Burlington, The Guardian and The New York Times.

Commissions include engravings for the Victoria & Albert Museum, British Library, British Museum, National Gallery, Sotheby's, The Times, Vital Arts (London) NHS Trust, Balliol College Oxford and Oxford University Press.

Public and private collections with holdings of her work include the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Victoria & Albert Museum, National Art Library, The Museum of London, British Museum, British Library, all London; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; Manchester University; Ex Libris Museum, Moscow, Russia; Musee d'Art Contemporain, Chamalieres, France; Ostrobothnian Museum, Vaasa, Finland; Lahti Art Museum, Finland; Museu de Arte do Espirito Santo, Vitoria, Brazil; Municipal Art Gallery, Lodz, Poland; Museo Civico, Cremona, Italy; and IMG Corporate, New York, USA

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