Kaye Donachie

Kaye Donachie is a British painter born in Glasgow in 1970 and based in London. She studied Fine Art at the University of Central England in Birmingham, attended the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin and completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 1997. Her work has been exhibited internationally since the 1990s, including long-running representation and solo exhibitions with Maureen Paley.

Donachie’s paintings are frequently built around women drawn from literature, art, counterculture and personal history. Portraits appear through veiled colour, cropped composition and softly destabilised space, with figures carrying the atmosphere of memory, longing or private conviction. Her exhibition history includes solo projects in London, Berlin, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Milan and Ireland, and her work is represented in institutional collections.

Her connection with Erdem Moralıoğlu reaches back to their RCA years and later included a commissioned portrait of his mother. In 2025 that long relationship became ERDEM’s first formal collaboration with a living artist, extending across a pre-fall project and the Autumn/Winter 2025 runway. Donachie’s paintings were translated into textile, print and surface treatments while retaining the tonal ambiguity of the original works.

Donachie paints figures through atmosphere as much as likeness. Thin layers, muted colour and softly articulated faces allow a portrait to hold distance and intimacy at the same time. Her subjects often emerge from historical photographs, biographies and literary fragments, giving the finished image the quality of a remembered presence.

The paintings repeatedly return to women connected with artistic communities, utopian experiments and forms of private resistance. Composition is economical, with faces, hands and clothing carrying much of the emotional information. The surface can feel quiet or faded while small shifts in hue and gesture make the psychological register highly specific.

In the ERDEM collaboration, this painterly language moved onto clothing through print and textile. The transfer preserved Donachie’s soft edges, tonal washes and portrait fragments, allowing the garments to carry the emotional residue of painting while Moralıoğlu controlled silhouette and fashion construction.