Anne Desmet RA
Anne was born and brought up in Liverpool, England. She has BFA and MA degrees in Fine Art from Oxford and in 2018 she was elected an Honorary Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford University, for ‘distinction in the world of art’.
She exhibits wood engravings, linocuts and printed collages widely, has won over 40 national and international awards (including a Rome Scholarship in Printmaking; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, USA; and Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Award, Montreal, Canada) and has works in major public and private collections worldwide. The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and 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 253-year history. She lives and works in London and curated an historic exhibition celebrating 100 years of the art of wood engraving for the Ashmolean Museum (2020) and touring UK.
