The Wild, Winding World of Rose Wylie Is on View at the Royal Academy of Arts
The British artist's Royal Academy retrospective unleashes fantastical, outsized paintings that fuse film lore, tabloid glamour, wartime memory, and English eccentricity with the bite of a lifelong rebel
At 91 years young and the very model of a bad girl English painter, Rose Wylie has been given a retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts. It is the institution’s first full-scale solo show by a British woman artist, although Wylie, elected a Royal Academician in 2014, has at least had some opportunity to make her presence felt, with the same heat-seeking sense of fun and urgency she brings to her work, at the solemn club on Piccadilly.
“You walk around and see people smiling,” reports Sir Bob Geldof in some recent video footage from the start of the exhibition. “It’s a very happy show.”
Luckily for Wylie—or maybe it’s the other way around—the main galleries, which host the 90 works in “Rose Wylie: The Picture Comes First,” are presented, as billed, royal in scale. She thinks big and paints big. Her canvases, often multiple panels, are full of fantastical juxtapositions and bustling contrasts that exuberantly broadcast her provocative, irreverent, and voraciously wide-ranging interest in how the world is viewed. Both scrapbook-like and monumental, they are contradictions in terms that rewrite assumptions and, with wit and charm, are unafraid to bring about change.
Married young to a fellow artist, Wylie pulled a 20-year disappearing act from the art world, in the belief that raising children and creating canvases didn’t mix. It took until 2010 for her to turn the corner from obscurity to recognition with the show “Women to Watch,” at Washington’s National Museum of Women in the Arts.
She’s ascended since then to media darling and cultural icon, and the 17th-century house in Kent she’s lived in for the past 50 years, with no apparent desire to tidy its fairy-dust mess, has gone viral across the worlds of art, fashion, and social media.
A devoted film enthusiast, Wylie takes her Hollywood straight, no chaser; blood-soaked scenography and and uncensored characters find their way into her work. Kill Bill (Film Notes) (2007) puddles bright red; in NK (Syracuse Line-up) (2014), a talismanic photograph of Nicole Kidman in a pink gown becomes a vengeful figure in scarlet; in a tribute to Werner Herzog, Wylie turned her garden path into a gun.
Painting as though a guileless child handed a giant brush, Wylie doesn’t hold back on tabloid culture, making stick-figure blondes into literal bombshells. In Pink Skater (Will I Win, Will I Win) (2015), a smiling balloon appears up to no good. Watching her rummage through image banks as disparate as ancient Egypt, Renaissance painting, all manner of media, paper dolls, pets, her experience of World War II, and winning moments in English soccer with her funhouse lens, it’s easy to see why younger artists like Sue Coe and Tracey Emin have taken note.
If there is, among a generation of a certain age, a sense of resemblance between Wylie and a pretty, high-spirited young girl they’ve seen before, it’s because in 1955, as a student at the Folkestone and Dover School of Art, she was tapped as that year’s “Aero girl” in Rowntree’s advertisements for its chocolate bars. Loewe nicely turned the tables on that when it had Wylie design a tea set last year, and twisted her spokesmodel gig another notch when Juergen Teller photographed her for the house’s SS25 pre-collection campaign.
The Royal Academy has a very nice gift shop—and now lots of very lovely Rose Wylie merch.
“Rose Wylie: The Picture Comes First,” is on view at the Royal Academy of Arts through April 19.