Rose Wylie: CLOSE, not too close

David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by British artist Rose Wylie at the gallery’s recently opened location in Los Angeles. Featuring a group of new large-scale paintings as well as related drawings, the presentation includes works that variously feature Wylie’s home and garden, media she’s consumed, and other elements drawn from her daily life and surroundings—together forming an unconventional portrait of the artist. This will be Wylie’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles and her sixth with David Zwirner.

Image: Installation view, Rose Wylie: CLOSE, not too close, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, 2023

Location

612 North Western Avenue Los Angeles CA, 90004

Dates

September 8—October 14, 2023

Opening Reception

Friday, September 8, 6–8 PM

Gallery Hours

Tues—Sat 10am–6pm

Artist

Rose Wylie

Press Release

CLOSE, not too close

Rose Wylie in her studio. Photo by Will Grundy

Rose Wylie has become known for her uniquely recognizable, colorful, 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. The artist has long been interested in exploring perspectival and compositional strategies other than—and along with—traditional Renaissance perspective, frequently making numerous iterations of a given motif as a means of advancing her formal investigation.

Installation view, Rose Wylie: CLOSE, not too close, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, 2023

“When I make a painting, I observe, but I also transform. You’re observing that they are this color, this shape, this size. They look like this, they feel like this, they smell like this. And then you try to put those things together in a painting.”

—Rose Wylie

Rose Wylie, My House, 2023

CLOSE, not too close presents a group of canvases that evoke in the viewer a feeling of immediacy, each depicting Wylie’s observation of a particular moment that is atemporal yet also grounded in her everyday existence. The artist’s home and studio—a seventeenth-century house where she has lived for more than fifty years—features in several works. Some of the works on view have inadvertent but serendipitous resonances with the Los Angeles setting of the exhibition.

Rose Wylie’s studio. Photo by Will Grundy

“The image is arrived at through many drawings, evolving from a process of observation, personality, and response: keeping something of the original subject, but hoping for a transformation into a poetic and particular from or whole, free from conventional representation.”

—Rose Wylie

Rose Wylie, HAND, Drawing as Central, 2022

“[Wylie’s] paintings exemplify the artist’s ability to absorb visually powerful impressions from her immediate surroundings. They also illustrate her broad knowledge of cultural production, spanning popular and cliché styles as well as underexamined and non-Western visual traditions.”

—Tanja Boon, Rose Wylie: picky people notice…,

Installation view, Rose Wylie: picky people notice...,, S.M.A.K., Stedelik Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, 2022. Photo by Dirk Pauwels

As curator Clarrie Wallis notes, “Wylie’s work is a sophisticated transmutation, or sifting of perceptual experience, carrying as it does a wealth of affective and allusive resonances, into the painted form. The imagery comes to her through the filter of her memory and, while the paintings can be understood as a diary of her life, they also succeed in presenting us with subjects that are at once familiar and universal.”

Rose Wylie, Spindle and Cover Girl, 2022 (detail)

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An installation view of the exhibition, Rose Wylie: CLOSE, not too close, at David Zwirner in Los Angeles, dated 2023.

Rose Wylie

Greg’s Flowers, 2023

Oil on canvas

72 3/8 x 60 inches (183.8 x 152.4 cm)