Centro de Arte Contemporáneo (CAC), Málaga
2018
May 4–September 9, 2018
Marking the first-ever museum exhibition of Rose Wylie’s work in Spain, Rose Wylie: Hullo, Hullo . . . at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo (CAC) in Málaga presented twenty-nine paintings. The works ranged in date from 1992 to 2017, and included both single and multipart paintings, the largest of which, Yellow Strip (2006), unfolds across five panels. The show was curated by Fernando Francés, director of CAC Málaga.
The exhibition’s title came from a recent painting, Hullo, Hullo, Following-on After the News (2017), and evinces the verbal and visual cadence of Wylie’s work. Recent solo exhibitions, includingHorse, Bird, Cat at David Zwirner London in 2016 and Quack Quack at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, in 2017, share the same staccato directness. Discussing her choice of title for the Serpentine exhibition with the gallery’s Artistic Director, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Wylie explained, "It was Dada, it was irreverent, and I like irreverence. It’s got a certain rhythm to it, it repeats. . . . There’s no need for translation. . . . Quack Quack in fact is an echo of what I think paintings do and why they have superiority and priority over text."
This spirit of spontaneity and openness is clear in Wylie’s exuberant compositions, which are wittily observed and subtly sophisticated musings on the nature of visual representation itself. In the artist’s idiosyncratic approach, which draws imagery from film, fashion, literature, mythology, newspapers, and sports, The Guardian’s critic Jonathan Jones recognizes that Wylie creates with "total freedom from any law of god, man or the Royal Academy." Likening her to twentieth-century predecessors, such as Henri Rousseau and Florine Stettheimer, who found renewal "in the bright colours and crude shapes of an art that seems artless," Jones sees in Wylie’s work "a way forward for painting in this century."
The works shown at CAC Málaga draw on an array of sources, from the "ack ack" anti-aircraft guns she remembers hearing as a child in London during World War II, to museum visits, tennis matches, and the actor Nicole Kidman. Like the subjects that populated Lolita’s House, her recent solo exhibition at David Zwirner London, these eclectic compositions reflect Wylie’s fascination with memory and the associations that become attached to it over time.