Rose Wylie: Which One

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by British artist Rose Wylie (b. 1934) at the gallery’s 533 West 19th Street location in New York. Following her acclaimed 2020 solo presentation at the Aspen Art Museum, this will be the artist’s fourth exhibition with the gallery, and the first with David Zwirner in New York.

Drawing from such wide-ranging cultural arenas as film, fashion photography, literature, mythology, history, news images, and sports, Wylie paints colorful and exuberant compositions that are uniquely recognizable. Frequently using images as a prompt, the artist works primarily from memory, resulting in paintings and drawings that are replete with associative afterimages that remain only loosely tethered to their original referents, but tightly connected to the memories as they have developed over time.

In this respect, drawing is an important aspect of Wylie’s practice—once she has selected an image or a topic, she typically makes numerous drawings as a kind of mnemonic exercise from which her paintings eventually emerge.

As the curator Clarrie Wallis notes, Wylie’s “large pictures are painted in a kind of visual shorthand that is direct and legible. The ability to elicit a range of responses is made possible precisely because of her reduction of form to an essential vibrancy that incorporates, via the very physicality of her medium, not just what the artist sees but an accompanying multitude of thoughts, feelings, and memories. Wylie’s work is a sophisticated transmutation, or sifting of perceptual experience, carrying as it does a wealth of affective and allusive resonances, into the painted form.”

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Image: Rose Wylie, I Like To Be, 2020 (detail)