Opening Friday, September 9, 2011, 6 – 9 p.m.
Rose Wylie’s large-scale paintings and drawings depict simple motifs - animals, cartoonlike figures, insects, skulls and flowers – and follow a faux-naïf strain in English art history. She is inspired by everyday imagery but also draws from a comprehensive knowledge of art historical references; including Dürer woodcuts, El Greco, de Chirico and Egyptian and Roman wall paintings.
Raw brushstrokes laid on with tremendous physicality and a rough texture of impasto paint bring a sense of immediacy and anarchy. Wylie often hides unsatisfactory results with a patch of fresh canvas, white paint or simply by scratching out. She often writes on her paintings and text is included as much for pattern as for content. This amalgamation of image and text creates a maze of narrative possibilities where the process of combining produces a distinct interplay between meaning and representation.
Her over-sized figures have a cartoon graphic quality and seem to carry the simplicity and innocence of children’s or primitive art. The works are suggesting an unmediated creative process devoid of intellectual or conceptual elements. Upon closer inspection the depth of imagery with its different styles and textures makes the experience increasingly complex both materially and stylistically. There is a discrepancy and tension between the distantly remembered subjects and the intensely present material in her work. It seems as if Wylie is concerned with achieving the most basic legibility of an image; as if she paints in order to escape academicism and return to ‘untaughtness’ in an effort to recapture spontaneity.
Rose Wylie (b. 1934 in Kent, UK) lives and works in Kent, UK. She attended The Royal College of Art, London from 1979 to 1981 and the Folkestone and Dover School of Art from 1952 to 1956. Selected exhibitions: 2011: Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin, Germany (solo), The Drawing Room, London, UK (solo). 2010: National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, USA (group); UNION Gallery, London, UK (solo), Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, USA (solo). 2009: Turner Contemporary, Kent, UK (group). 2008: Transition Gallery, London, UK (solo).
