Rose Wylie, Chocolate Selection: Milk Chocolate, White Chocolate & Plain Chocolate, 2015
Oil on canvas, 71 3/4 x 196 3/4 inches, 182 x 500 cm
VW (VeneKlasen/Werner) is pleased to announce Dressed To Kill, an exhibition by British artist Rose Wylie. Dressed To Kill presents an entirely new body of paintings and related works on paper made especially for VW (VeneKlasen/Werner).
Rose Wylie is a fiercely independent spirit, a highly gifted artist whose faux-naïve style and seemingly slapdash painterly manner belie a classical sensibility. Discussing her pictures, Wylie is as likely to reference the Elizabethan court paintings of Robert Peake as the films of Quentin Tarantino and Werner Herzog. This conflation of classicism and the contemporary vernacular is reminiscent of Philip Guston’s late painting, equally in debt to Quattrocento painting and the cultural landscape of mid-century America. Wylie’s subjects are drawn from contemporary sport, film and news headlines; also the landscape of her longtime home in rural Kent and the commonplace particulars of her daily life. Wylie works from observation and memory, internalizing her subjects, tirelessly reworking a given motif in drawing and collage until the image is suffused with the artist’s idiosyncratic style and emotional tenor. Her insistence on motif over narrative suggests something like abstraction.
Wylie typically works on more than one canvas at a time. Beginning with a single oversized sheet of burlap stapled flat against the wall, Wylie allows the evolution of her compositions to determine the ultimate structure of the work, often appending additional sheets of burlap to the bottom or sides of the initial surface. The resulting grids may be connected by passages of large painted writing relating to the subject depicted.
Rose Wylie was born in Kent in 1934. She attended the Folkestone & Dover School of Art until 1956 but soon put aside her artistic ambitions to raise her children. Wylie returned to painting two decades later, resuming her art training at London’s Royal College of Art and earning her MA, in 1981. Since then she has exhibited in numerous national and international solo- and group exhibitions.
Today works by Rose Wylie are included in the public collections of Tate Britain, London; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; the Arts Council of England; Contemporary Art Society, London; Hammer Collection, Los Angeles; Jerwood Foundation, London; the Norwich Gallery, Norwich; Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg. Recent solo exhibitions include Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2015); Städtische Galerie, Wolfsburg (2014); Tate Britain, London (2013); Haugar Museum, Tønsberg (2013); Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, The University of the Arts, Philadelphia (2012); and Jerwood Gallery, Hastings (2012). In 2014 Wylie became the 29th recipient of the John Moores Painting Prize. In 2015 she received the Charles Wollaston Award of the Royal Academy of Arts and was named an Elect Member of the Academy. Rose Wylie currently lives and works in Kent.
