Rose Wylie: painting a noun…

David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by British artist Rose Wylie—her first solo presentation in Hong Kong. painting a noun… will include several groups of related paintings and drawings that collectively underscore the importance of memory—as both a fixed and a shifting concept—within the artist’s practice. 

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 on that theme as a kind of mnemonic exercise from which her paintings eventually emerge.

Image: Rose Wylie, Spider, 2019 (detail)