Born in 1934, Rose Wylie recalls in conversation and work alike an early childhood in India and wartime England, skies streaked with buzz bombs. As a teen in art school, Wylie studied figurative painting, a fact perhaps unsurprising given how her works teem with so much life. But hers is an oeuvre marked as much by remembrance as observation, showing in most instances the welcome perversion of the latter by measures of time and distance, but also technologies of mediation, inclusive of drawing. A latter-day Ovidian visual culture well suited to the vulgarities of our mediagenic surround, Wylie’s immanent landscapes mine the uncouthness of celebrity and transformation, the siren calls of patronizing reinvention together with the hard-earned volition of becoming. And they do this with a companionable, even relational effort at understanding. When Wylie returned to the Royal College of Art in London, in 1979, she had raised three children. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1985 at the Trinity Arts Centre, in Kent, where she still works in the cottage where she has lived for more than half a century. It bears mention that her career 2.0 got going in the context of an emergent Neo-Expressionism exemplified by the masculinist ethos of A New Spirit in Painting (1981)—and a run of international exhibitions held at the Whitechapel Gallery curated by Nicholas Serota. This happened, too, alongside the subsequent recuperation of Howard Hodgkin and the School of London in addition to the promotion of contemporary Expressionists. Her work ethic is now legendary, and she has been sanguine about the delay in her own more sustained public presence, which did nevertheless effect a space of intentionality for the work. From here, her mode of appropriation feels as central to this period, and to ours, as anything. I spoke with Rose Wylie on September 11, 2023, on the occasion of her first show in Los Angeles, at David Zwirner Gallery. This interview is an edited and condensed version of our conversation.
Read more