'Rose Wylie: ‘It’s very, very fragile where a painting ends. All the time it sits on a precarious edge’' by Louisa Buck
2026
The British artist Rose Wylie is known for her giant, exuberant figurative paintings that combine an eclectic and idiosyncratic range of references taken from across art history, ancient civilisations, cinema, television, celebrity culture, current affairs and her direct surroundings. She studied at the Dover School of Art and Goldsmiths’ College in the 1950s but stopped making art for 25 years to raise a family—although she continued to teach throughout this time. In 1979, as a mature student, Wylie studied for a postgraduate degree at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, graduating at the age of 46. But it was not until the 2000s that her work achieved wider recognition, most notably when she was included in Women to Watch at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, in 2010. This was the same year that Germaine Greer wrote about Wylie in The Guardian under a headline calling her “Britain’s hottest new artist”. Institutional UK solo shows soon followed in the 2010s at the Jerwood Gallery, Tate Britain and the Serpentine Gallery. Wylie also won the John Moores Painting Prize in 2014 and was awarded an OBE in 2018. Now, at 91, she is the first woman painter, and only the second female artist, to occupy the main galleries at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in London with her largest career survey to date. The show comprises more than 90 works, including a number of new paintings made over the past two years. Read more.