Rachel Withers

Personal statement

Rachel Withers is an art writer and co-founder of PRAKSIS, an Oslo-based international arts and culture incubator that focuses on artistic and cultural development through shared experience. She studied History of Art at the Courtauld Institute and Critical Fine Art Practice at Central St Martin’s School of Art and Design.

Withers’s writing on contemporary art has been published in a wide variety of mainstream and art-specialist contexts. A frequent contributor to Artforum International for twenty years, she has also written for NewStatesman, The Guardian, Frieze, Burlington Contemporary and the Nordic daily, Aftonbladet. She has scripted catalogue essays for art institutions internationally, including a 6,000-word experimental “interview” with Mike Nelson commissioned for the British Pavilion catalogue at the 2011 Venice Biennale, numerous texts on the Swiss artist Roman Signer, and key essays on the works of João Penalva, Susan Hiller, and La Ribot.

Recent projects include a French-to-English translation of scholarly writing on Hubert Duprat. She has served on the panels of various international art prizes, including the Max Mara Prize for Women, 2007-9, and the International Award for Art Criticism, 2014. Between 2003 and 2013 Withers served on the Board of Matt’s Gallery, London. She is currently a trustee of the Gane Trust.

PRAKSIS

As co-founder of Oslo-based arts and culture incubator PRAKSIS, Withers supports director Nicholas John Jones in planning the organisation’s international residencies and future programmes. She also co-edits its book publications, supports its website and communications, and co-edits and introduces PRAKSIS Presents, an online showcase for work by PRAKSIS alumni.

She lends PRAKSIS her expertise as Ethics Lead in Bath Spa's School of Art, Film and Media, and advocates for the organisation, including its Teen Advisory Board and PRAKSIS Development Forum strands.

In 2019, she led a month-long Oslo-based PRAKSIS residency, delivering a seven-part seminar exploring the diverse art-world histories and applications of the “residency” construct. She continues to research and reflect on this often under-reported keystone area in the international art world.

Library of Marvels

In 2012 Withers was awarded a Brown Foundation Fellowship at the Maison Dora Maar in Provence to develop an art installation based on the contents of Roman Signer’s library. The first outcome of this research was the exhibition Roman Signer’s Library of Marvels (Fast Version), exhibited in Spring 2015 at the Rose Lipman Building in London N1, UK. In 2021, The Library of Marvels (Expanded Version) was shown in the Vadiana Library in Signer’s home town of St Gallen, Switzerland and in Hamburg, Germany. Future incarnations and adaptations of the Library of Marvels, including its archive of hundreds of digital images, are in plan.

Professional memberships

• Trustee, Gane Trust

Teaching specialism

• The history of art, with a focus on art practice since 1980
• Representations of time, history and narrative in contemporary art
• Contemporary art's examinations of the museum, the archive, hermeticism, intertextuality and obsolete, "outsider" or marginalised knowledge systems
• Art criticism and art writing; experiments in art writing.