Installation view, Rose Wylie: Car and girls, David Zwirner, London, 2022
David Zwirner is pleased to present new work by British artist Rose Wylie (b. 1934) in The Upper Room at the gallery’s London location. The exhibition will feature both two- and three-dimensional works, emphasising the interchange between painting and sculpture in the artist’s practice and highlighting the way in which her move into sculpture in recent years has enabled her to explore new perspectives on recurrent motifs.
Wylie has become known for her uniquely recognisable, colourful, and exuberant compositions that at first glance appear aesthetically simplistic, not seeming to align with any discernible style or movement, but on closer inspection are revealed to be wittily observed and subtly sophisticated meditations on the nature of visual representation itself. While sculpture is a relatively new innovation in the artist’s body of work, introduced within the last five years, Wylie has long been interested in exploring perspectival and compositional strategies other than, and as well as, traditional Renaissance perspective, frequently making numerous iterations of a given theme or motif as a means of advancing her formal investigation. As curator Melissa Blanchflower has described, ‘Wylie ultimately selects the subjects of her paintings for their intrinsic value as images. She is interested in the collision of different forms.… This dispels any pre-conceived hierarchy between genres, subjects and scale. It is composition, colour, form and pace that connect [her works] … not their depicted subjects.’1
Image: Installation view, Rose Wylie: Car and girls, David Zwirner, London, 2022
1 Melissa Blanchflower, ed., ‘Quack Quack, Ack Ack’, in Rose Wylie: Quack Quack. Exh. cat. (London: Serpentine Galleries, 2017), p. 28.
Installation view, Rose Wylie: Car and girls, David Zwirner, London, 2022
Featuring both two- and three-dimensional works, this exhibition emphasizes the interchange between painting and sculpture in Rose Wylie’s practice. For the artist, working in three dimensions is a further act of translation from original image to painting to sculpture, extending her distinctive visual language into the viewer’s space.
Rose Wylie, Red Girl (face), 2020 (detail)
“Several canvases quite often come together as a single work at a certain point in their realization. This may be the result of a chance meeting, side by side, on floor or wall. Something clicks, and a single painting develops into a diptych or a triptych.”
—Michael Glover, Rose Wylie: painting a noun …
“Recently I’ve been painting a woman I saw running down the hill with her dog on a leash behind her.… That pose reminded me of an Assyrian sculpture. The first painting I did of her, I didn’t have the leg right, so I did another one.”
—Rose Wylie, The Paris Review
Rose Wylie, Pink Girl, Like an Assyrian Dancer and Pink Clouds, 2021 (detail)
Rose Wylie, Pink Girl, Like an Assyrian Dancer and Pink Clouds, 2021 (detail)
Installation view, Rose Wylie: Car and girls, David Zwirner, London, 2022
Rose Wylie, Pineapple, 2021 (detail)
Rose Wylie, Pineapple, 2021 (detail)
“Images and characters are not only animated within individual paintings, but also evolve within space… Throughout the exhibition, motifs reoccur and themes, forms and colours expand, … creating movement akin to a filmstrip.”
—Hans Ulrich Obrist and Yana Peel, Rose Wylie: Quack Quack
Installation view, Rose Wylie: Car and girls, David Zwirner, London, 2022
Rose Wylie, She Runs Down the Hill like an Assyrian Dancer, 2021 (detail)
Rose Wylie, She Runs Down the Hill like an Assyrian Dancer, 2021 (detail)
“It is Rose’s use of collage that sets her apart. Rarely are we allowed to see into an artist’'s working, to see their ‘mistakes’ … but Rose exposes us to her decisions, right up to the point of release, a celebration of her process. Paper is laid over paper, canvas over canvas, sections crafted and reworked continuously, over and over, until satisfaction is found.”
—Russell Tovey, Rose Wylie: Let it Settle
“She draws to achieve a certain likeness to the subject and then paints to achieve a certain likeness to the drawing… Her particular working methods allow for interpretations and reinterpretations that lend themselves to second thoughts, corrections, re-drawings and re-orderings so that there is a certain nonchalance present in the final work.”
—Clarrie Wallis, director of Turner Contemporary
Rose Wylie, Jazz Night Trio, Bartok, 2021 (detail)
Rose Wylie, Jazz Night Trio, Bartok, 2021 (detail)
“Subjects are often outlined in black or a dark colour and are frequently floating against areas of bare ground, sometimes enclosed in a border.… There is of course an element of the comedic in her work. This is achieved in part through the boldly schematic execution of her subjects, but also through the inclusion of devices associated with cartoons.”
—Ann Gallagher, curator
Rose Wylie, Grumpy Girl, 2021 (detail)
Rose Wylie, Liqueur Bottle, 2020 (detail)
“Like Philip Guston, to whom she’s often compared, [Wylie] engages with the aesthetics of cartoon, unashamedly ramping up certain figurative elements in her paintings.… ‘It’s breaking a rule, but it’s only the rule of proportion, a realist rule. That’s what I do.’ And in so doing, Wylie delivers something much more acutely observed.”
—Harriet Baker, Apollo Magazine
Installation view, Rose Wylie: Car and girls, David Zwirner, London, 2022
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