

Rose Wylie : Lolita’s House
David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by British artist Rose Wylie spanning three floors of the gallery’s London location.
Loosely referencing a house that was constructed in the 1970s in the prevalent style of the period across the street from Wylie’s residence in Kent, and the neighbor’s teenage daughter who would often wash their car in the driveway, Lolita’s House continues the artist’s ongoing fascination with the shifting nature of memory and the wide-ranging external associations that become attached to it over time.
Image: Rose Wylie, Yellow Girls I, 2017 (detail)
Published by David Zwirner Books on the occasion of this exhibition, a special limited-edition zine presents the artist's new series of paintings and works on paper in printed form. Titled Lolita’s House , the zine features Wylie’s animated brushstrokes on every page.
Join Rose Wylie and Melissa Blanchflower, curator of the artist’s critically acclaimed solo exhibition at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in 2017, for the zine launch and finissage of Lolita’s House at David Zwirner London.
Thursday, May 24, 5–7PM
RSVP to Avia Wiseman at avia@davidzwirner.com or +44 203 538 3165
"The [studio] floor is dense with newspaper and stacks of paint pots . . . The bookcases hold tomes by the artists she most admires, from American punk cartoonist Raymond Pettibon to the German provocateur Sigmar Polke . . . Yet she cautions me not to get too hung up on the references. ‘The painting isn’t about something. . . . The message is the painting.’" — The Guardian ’s Skye Sherwin meets Rose Wylie at home.
"My main interest is how the work looks, but meaning—politics, issues, story, and so on—remains as part of the structure of making a work, an act which is both personal and contemporary. In my life I stack and heap up notations of experiences, and often repeat this process in combinations of paintings as I see them in my mind. The flexibility of leaving bare canvas and ‘floating’ imagery allows these regroupings and linear-continuations to happen easily in a picture hang, while also permitting individual paintings to keep their own particular, independent identity." —Rose Wylie, quoted in the announcement for the prestigious John Moores Painting Prize , awarded by the Walker Art Gallery as part of the Liverpool Biennial, which she won in 2014.
"In her ongoing Film Notes series, Wylie reduces films to a single image that has lodged within her memory. As with many of her paintings, she does not return to the original source material as a reference, but often filters the image from her recollections and impressions. She applies cinematic techniques to the structure of her paintings, where text takes the form of subtitles and compositions are formed by the frame of the camera. . . . Her works are often made up of multiple panels installed in sequences, creating a kind of filmstrip of closely abutted canvases that can run the length of a gallery wall, wrap around corners and be stacked at height." —Melissa Blanchflower, "Quack Quack, Ack Ack," published in the catalogue accompanying the artist’s major exhibition Rose Wylie: Quack Quack at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, 2017.

"You can’t manufacture a painting and you can’t manufacture the interest . . . that begins a painting." —In this intimate exchange with the comedian Stewart Lee for the BBC’s Only Artists series, recorded in her studio while Wylie was preparing for Lolita’s House, the artist discusses the process of creating works such as Lolita's House and Two Cars (2018), and reflects on the broader nature of her practice.
Image: Installation view, Rose Wylie: Lolita’s House, David Zwirner, London, 2018.