Rose Wylie Interviewed in Burlington Contemporary

In 2017 Alvaro Barrington (b.1983) contributed a text titled ‘A long short rapid brushstroke’ to the catalogue for the solo exhibition Quack Quack by Rose Wylie (b.1934) at the Serpentine Galleries, London. In it, he noted that ‘there is a certain intelligence that comes with making a painting’–one that concerns ‘how your eye creates an image’, in ‘upending your visual expectations so that the experience of the work continues to be fresh, continues to exist in your imagination, long after it has been experienced’. Wylie’s way of working, he continued, leaves him ‘restless, wanting to move around’, his eyes becoming ‘active’ when looking but also reflecting on her work. Four years later, Barrington and Wylie’s exchange was continued when their work was exhibited side by side in the group exhibition Mixing It Up: Painting Today at the Hayward Gallery, London. The pairing was apt not only for Barrington’s recurrent use of the rose motif–most notably in the exhibited painting A Rose for a Rose (2021), which he dedicated to Wylie–but also for both artists’ approach to image-making and their shared tendency to draw from and rework everyday visual culture.

Read more at Burlington Contemporary.