About the Artist

Anne Desmet RA was born and brought up in Liverpool. She has BFA and MA degrees in Fine Art from Oxford University, a Postgraduate Diploma in Printmaking from Central School of Art, London, and in 2018 she was elected an Honorary Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford University, for ‘distinction in the world of art’.

She exhibits her wood engravings, linocuts and collages widely, has won over 30 national and international awards (including a Rome Scholarship in Printmaking; a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, USA; and an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Award, Montreal, Canada) and has works in public and private collections worldwide. The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and the 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 the Whitworth (2008) respectively: each toured UK museums for two years. She had an earlier retrospective at Moscow’s Ex Libris Museum, Russia (1995); and a solo exhibition of new and recent work at the Holburne Museum, Bath, in 2017. Desmet is author of three printmaking books and was editor of Printmaking Today magazine from 1998-2013.

She is only the third wood engraver ever elected to membership of the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in its 250-year history and in 2016 the RA published a facsimile sketchbook featuring 25 years of her Italian drawings. Prints and collages based on these drawings will be exhibited in a solo exhibition at Gainsborough’s House Museum, Sudbury, Suffolk, from June – October 2018.

She lives and works in London.