“When you’re an artist, you don’t have to do what you’re told to do.”
An interview with Rose Wylie by Harriet Baker
Apollo: The International Art Magazine. January 18, 2020.
‘I have a slight empathy with dust. If I see it I don’t rush to clear it up.’ Rose Wylie looks about the dining room of her 17th-century cottage in Kent, where she has lived for some 50 years. It has a cold brick floor and a ceiling of slanted glass panels, which look as if they have never been cleaned. Yellowy November light streams through the glass, softened by watermarks and the dark blotches of lichen and dead leaves.
Outside, the garden has been left to its own devices, and presses close to the house, a lattice of shoots and branches. Some have snaked in at the windows and up to the ceiling, where they have dried and are now festooned with cobwebs. More sprigs of foliage have been stuffed into vases and placed along the windowsills; these, too, have dried into apricot-coloured crispness.
On the table, as if arranged for a still life, is Wylie’s breakfast tray: mismatched coffee cup and saucer, crested Folkestone jug, two-handled silver sugar bowl, and the remains of porridge in a blue-edged scalloped dish. The effect of all this is a kind of well-worn, shabby elegance. Wylie, with her dark lipstick, green cardigan and choppy grey hair, smiles mischievously, and waves away the mess.
I’m visiting the painter at home as she prepares for ‘Let It Settle’, an exhibition at the Gallery at Windsor in Vero Beach, Florida (28 January–30 April). It’s one of three international shows in 2020, proof of her ever-blooming reputation. Though she’s quick to reject the focus on her age – ‘I just think it’s unnecessary, it doesn’t matter’ – her late-life success is remarkable. She first studied art in the 1950s, but gave it up in order to look after her children, only returning to the Royal College of Art for an MA in 1979.
For more than 10 years, she worked in obscurity, the paintings stacking up on the floor in her studio, until she began to be noticed for competition entries. Then recognition came quickly. In 2014, she was awarded the John Moores Painting Prize; three years later, she had a retrospective at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London; and last year, at the age of 84, she received an OBE for services to art. ‘Suddenly, it all came together,’ she says. ‘But the work is no different, and I’m no different.’
The work for which she has become known is large-scale and exuberant. Wylie paints with graphic simplicity, depicting scenes as if from storybooks or comic strips: a puffed-up and expectant queen surrounded by pansies (Queen with Pansies (Dots), 2016); the uniformed figures from a Tarantino film (Inglourious Basterds (Film Notes), 2010); a bare-backed Nicole Kidman on the red carpet (NK (Syracuse Line-Up), 2014); a girl eating a chocolate biscuit (Choco Leibnitz, 2006).
Her figures are rounded and cartoonish, with thick outlines and exaggerated features, their limbs often caught mid-motion. She uses colour boldly and simply, and often adds text to her canvases in a scrappy but legible hand, serving as caption or commentary on the scene unfolding. She eschews art-world artiness; instead, the paintings are unaffected and joyful, and critics are captivated.
Wylie always begins with drawing, working downstairs at the dining-room table, often late into the night, before moving upstairs to paint. She shows me a series of prints on which she’s currently working, each one made up of two sheets of A3, laid side by side like the pages of the diary from which they’ve been photocopied.
They show sketches of a female figure, perhaps dancing, in a bulb-shaped dress, and the words ‘Black frock from Oxford 1956’ in Wylie’s distinctive, unruly hand. On one section, a map of the world is visible through the drawing, while elsewhere she has added patches of white paper, collaging over certain areas – the woman’s skirt, some of the lettering – until it seems she’s got it right. Finally, each has been worked up in a different bright colour: green, blue, pink, and yellow.
She is characteristically unpretentious about materials, working on printer paper with coloured pencils. ‘If you were at school, they would say these little pencils were not appropriate to use on a bigger scale,’ she says. ‘But it’s quite nice to use something inappropriate. It takes a long time. The colour is soft, like an old print; it’s not Technicolor, it’s not Hollywood. It’s got some other quality which rather fits.’
Wylie keeps a diary, which she uses as a sketchbook – ‘I do diary all the time, it’s nothing unusual’ – before transferring the pages on to canvas. She digs out another – a standard-looking engagement diary, with a black cover – to show me. Inside, day-to-day appointments and the addresses of curators and editors jostle with drawings: a drooping female figure, a horse, a line of buildings in biro. On one page, she has drawn her cat, Pete, as he lay across the desk in front of her. It’s a hasty sketch, a scrabble of thick pencil lines, but full of life, capturing the warmth of his sleeping heft. Above him she has written, ‘Lovely big slim Pete.’ It’s a joke, she tells me, as people often remark on his size. ‘But he’s not fat, he’s delightful,’ she croons.
She often comes across an idea for a painting in this way, making sketches after watching films, or after seeing something in a newspaper or on the street, or from memory. It’s a method that relies on chance, on her receptivity to the world around her, particularly the Kent village in which she lives. ‘I just see something,’ she says. ‘A cat. A bird. A woman’s hat. There was this amazing girl the other day, running in the field behind the house. She was picking up her legs like an ancient Egyptian, pointing her toes. She was terrific. I could have done her.’
She started Black frock from Oxford after remembering a dress she had bought from the designer brand Frank Usher in 1956. It was made from black silk with a ruched skirt. But a year later she met and married the painter Roy Oxlade, ‘a wonderful, rebellious kind of Marxist’, and the dress, with a silhouette belonging to another era, was never worn. ‘The frock didn’t fit the context that I was in, there was no opportunity for it,’ she explains. ‘But it’s come up now in the pictures.’
Upstairs, in her studio, several more versions of the print are pinned to the walls and spread over the floor. Some have been collaged, others painted. The room is claggy with paint, the table heaped with pots out of which poke laden, unwashed brushes, the chairs crusty with it, and the walls and windows covered in drips and scumbled marks. Underfoot, the floor bounces, carpeted with a thick layer of newspaper. She shows me a palette knife, the handle of which has never been washed. Its slim blade juts out of a protuberant, vegetable-like mass, sludgy in colour and tacky to touch. ‘It’s extraordinarily good, isn’t it?’ she says, laughing. ‘A real relic, a museum piece. It really is the shape of my hand.’
In here, it is easy to sense the verve and vigour with which Wylie works. She staples unprimed canvas directly on to the wall, doing away with ‘all that business of tightening it up and stretching it’, preferring it looser and a little frayed. ‘I just like it, all that curly stuff along the top. It’s like a curtain. It always has a bit of buckle.’ Her disinclination to tidy is another facet of this energy; she feels exhilarated and free when she lets things accumulate in her studio.
‘When you’re young you’re told to clear up,’ she tells me, ‘but the whole business about being an artist is you don’t have to do what you’re told to do. There are no rules. I just come in and do something, and then I put it on the top. When it really starts to get under my feet, when I can’t work, I’ll move it. Otherwise I enjoy it. It’s liberating.’
Wylie objects to dogmatism, particularly when it comes to her work. Pointing to one of the prints, on which the woman’s face is enlarged and heavily outlined, she says: ‘It looks like a crap figure and like some child has done it. In fact, it’s quite difficult to do.’ The critical vocabulary applied to her painting often has recourse to limp descriptors of the childlike: intuitive, crude, unpredictable. In 2013, reviewing the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition in the Evening Standard, the critic Brian Sewell went so far as to describe Wylie’s entry as ‘a daub worthy of a child of four’.
‘They’re not childlike,’ she shoots back. ‘It’s a dirty word for a lot of art people. But if you don’t do what’s considered to be good drawing, in the sense of the European development of art, then that’s what it’s called. In fact, it hasn’t been governed by rules, it’s freer, it’s not highly skilled in that sense. But people are sloppy, shallow, lazy, and frankly crap. Can you see how annoying it is?’
Instead, Wylie works with Matisse in mind: ‘He said, “Use everything at your disposal”.’ Like Philip Guston, to whom she’s often compared, she engages with the aesthetics of cartoon, unashamedly ramping up certain figurative elements in her paintings. ‘If a man is running you might see little blobs of sweat or whizzing marks,’ she explains. ‘A realist would never do that. They just paint what they’re looking at. But if you go along with Matisse, as children do, you use everything. If a child wants to draw a mother with a big head, for emphasis or because the head has a particular significance, then they’ll draw a figure with a big head. It’s breaking a rule, but it’s only the rule of proportion, a realist rule. That’s what I do.’
And in so doing, Wylie delivers something much more acutely observed. In Park Dogs & Air Raid (2017), for example, she depicts the Blitz (which she experienced aged four, living in Kensington) from the child’s eye view. Perspective is flattened, giving the viewer the Round Pond and the frolicking dogs as well as the planes overhead, their speed accentuated with zooming brush marks, the night sky illuminated by firework-like crackles of bombs. It has all the commotion and energy of the scene as it was observed.
Often, her paintings have this bric-a-brac element, the arrangement of disparate components – a fantasy-fluffy cloud, a star or a pansy, a jaunty line of text – scattered across the canvas. These additions appear extraneous, products of instinct rather than intent. But Wylie rails against being misunderstood, particularly against the claim that her work is eclectic – a word that so infuriated her she looked it up. ‘If it’s used correctly, eclectic means going back to well-held ideas, sifting and sorting them, and finding what you want, and that’s ok. But if eclecticism is a patchwork of things coming together by chance, then I find it very irritating.’
Certainly, Wylie sifts and sorts. Her sources are diverse, and she cites art-historical influences from El Greco to Judith Bernstein and Sam Doyle. But instead of a throwing-together, her paintings reflect a process of decision-making, ‘chucking out, editing’, each element carefully considered. ‘It’s an aesthetic judgement, and it’s discriminatory,’ she says. ‘It’s not about narrative or concept – I just prefer some shapes to others, I like contrasts, and I like lines. The quality of the image is what I’m concerned with.’
That’s true of (Sion) House (2019), which will be shown in Florida. Wylie lighted upon the image of Syon House in west London in a newspaper, a ‘marvellous, dark photograph’, and was drawn to its shape, a ‘simple, long oblong, very defined and very isolated. It was smashing, and so I painted it.’ But she’s wary of the meanings that might be read into the painting. ‘The fact that it’s a hugely privileged building doesn’t come into it,’ she explains. ‘It’s nothing to do with the opera that’s held there. There’s no politics.’
Likewise, she hesitates over her two paintings of Snow White, depicted doing housework, singing open-mouthed amid a clutter of household objects. Is the painting feminist through its ironising of the domestic? She replies teasingly: ‘I insist that the paintings do not rely on meaning for one second, but if you want to, you can dig into meaning. There’s plenty there.’ Such ambivalence might be obfuscating were it not a reflection of the way she works. Her paintings are associative rather than direct; they gather and distil, plucking from memory, observing from life, deeply engaged with the cut and thrust of contemporary culture.
While Oxlade was alive and the children were young, Wylie didn’t paint. ‘I am a joy for feminists, because I had a husband who had much more visibility than me,’ she says dryly. ‘For a long time, he was the artist and I was the artist’s wife. But it was a trigger, it spurred me on.’ For years, ‘my whole work was with the children and in the house; ordinary work, like making curtains and clothes for the children, and making food. But I was completely involved, completely in it; it was creative.’
When she began to paint, she was unstoppable, finally having a creative life that was ‘my own, separate, totally absorbing’. Did Oxlade support her work? ‘He loved my paintings, but he didn’t like the way I got to them. He wouldn’t come into the studio. He used to say my cupboards were disgraceful.’ But Wylie continued doggedly, ‘with no encouragement, and no visibility; in fact, nothing but a sense of discouragement, because discouragement can grow out of a lack of encouragement.’ In an industry that privileges the young, she triumphed. ‘My age is a beacon,’ she concedes, for other women who want to paint.
Now, she continues to demonstrate what she calls an openness, a sense that ‘anything can come up in any form’. She notices things, she likes clutter, and is always curious, watching two or three films a week and always buying a Sunday paper. She works on large canvases, often panelled together, because ‘I like coverage. I like big. I like generosity rather than mean, picky, finnicky.’
Throughout our interview, she reels off lists of the things she likes, because of the possibilities of their shape or colour, or their pleasing simplicity: ‘Chocolate. Cake. Biscuits. Parsley stalks. A leek. Leeks are very good’; ‘I love cheap paper. Cheap sweets are superb. Grappa is much better than brandy. And I prefer cheap flowers, not those orchids in florists which are so tiresome. Small daffodils – I can be very fond of them.’ These are the sorts of things that appear in her work, things that reveal her delight in the everyday, but also her total rejection of artifice and affectation. In everything she does – from the materials she uses to her refusal to tidy her cupboards – Wylie is unwaveringly, quietly rebellious.
After we have finished talking, we go downstairs for lunch, sitting at the table beneath the beautifully dirty windows in the watery light. Pete steals a piece of pork pie and Wylie scoops him adoringly into her lap. She’ll start painting in the afternoon, going on into the night because there’s nothing to stop her. She doesn’t work to a routine; she does as she pleases, and it’s enough. What she seems to be asking for is simple: look at the work, not at age or ideas; don’t pigeonhole or tidy. Like the plants pushing in at the windows, determined and unfussy – let her be. This artist is flourishing.
‘Let it Settle’ is at the Gallery at Windsor, Vero Beach, until 30 April; ‘Rose Wylie: Painting a Noun…’ is at David Zwirner, Hong Kong, until 22 February; ‘Rose Wylie’ is at Aspen Art Museum from 19 March–5 July.
From the January 2020 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Jai Llewellyn writes on Rose Wylie
July 7, 2018
Rose Wylie is not someone I had previously paid much attention to, but with her name cropping up all over the place at the moment, I thought that she must deserve some attention. I may be late to discover what Wylie has to offer: seen through a screen, (as is often the case these days) her imagery did not at first inspire instant love; but despite that, there were aspects of the work that caught my eye, warranting closer inspection. ‘Lolita’s House’, the show at David Zwirner, in London, was the first time I’d seen the work in the flesh; and those inklings I’d previously had, about how the paintings were put together, became more vivid in front of the work.
There’s a beautiful honesty to the construction of the paintings: the canvas is crudely cut and laid down, large sections are pasted over one another and re-painted, loose threads are deliberately left to hang, there are notes of measurements all around the periphery of the paintings left for all to see. Wylie writes, “…I use strips of canvas as collage on work that has gone wrong, so I think if you repair something you should see the mend, give respect for the work done.”1
The paint is generously applied, and slapped on thick. There are drips and splashes, smears and smudges all over the paintings, which are not apparent until you are face to face with them. They are undoubtedly painted quickly and with tremendous vigour, perhaps in the knowledge that time is not on her side. I am not suggesting that it may all come to an abrupt end; though there is a feeling of urgency from a woman in her later life wanting to achieve as much as possible. Whether this is the case or not, she has clearly been prolific in the few years since rising to stardom.
In a couple of the paintings you can plainly see the initial outline, sketched in paint and then nonchalantly filled in with colour, giving form to her characters, figures, animals or objects. She treats an eight-foot canvas no differently from a page in a sketchbook. Nevertheless, she does work from preliminary drawings, and there are a few examples in the exhibition: these are made in coloured pencil on cheap A4 paper, and employ the same cut-and-paste methods as the paintings.
You could be forgiven for thinking this all speaks of a slap-dash, cut-and-shunt approach, but there is more to her methods than that: there is a sensuality and delicate sensitivity in her use of materials and the language of paint. For her, the canvas is just as important as the paint, and its every aspect is considered. The raw canvas is given great respect and is allowed to shine through in most of the paintings, with large areas left blank, allowing the purity of the paint and colour to sing.
Wylie states,“ The flexibility of leaving bare canvas and ‘floating’ imagery allows these regroupings and linear-continuations to happen easily in a picture hang, while also permitting individual paintings to keep their own particular, independent identity.”2
It seems she paints these monumental canvases unstretched, and then glues them down onto a fresh piece of canvas before stretching them. This is never going to be an exact science, and Wylie does not try to hide any practical problems in their making; on the contrary, she makes a point of them. At first this appears to be an ad hoc procedure, with the edges and corners never quite meeting and nothing being perfectly square; but the more you look, the more you realise every decision has been carefully orchestrated. From the colour of the pencil registration line where she has glued a new piece of canvas over a ‘mistake’, to the slight tilt of the image, to the way the canvas caresses the edge of the support and a bit of something is cut off or slips off stage, to her aggressive cartoonist’s drawing style, everything adds to the overall feeling of slight uneasiness, which keeps you on edge, like the suspense in a Hitchcock thriller. For me, the way the paintings are made is as powerful as the imagery itself. I found myself getting lost in the details: for such expansive works, she really makes you pay attention to every little decision; and because of this, I almost forgot about any suggested narrative. They are beautiful objects in their own right, and can be appreciated simply for their sculptural qualities and use of material. Wylie herself says, “The painting isn’t about something. I think lots of people don’t understand that. They think it’s the message, which it isn’t. The message is the painting. The painting is the painting.”3
This might seem a strange statement, when the paintings appear to be trying so hard to communicate messages, with specific characters, names, times and places; and with texts, to boot. However, as one tries to make sense of the work, it quickly dissolves into a soup of random thoughts, colours and paint. The paintings are in fact almost abstract: as one looks, recognisable images break up and are broken down, and figurative elements become shapes and motifs. Relationships of colour and line dominate, and the entire painting is in constant flux. Natural Born Killers Close up is a good example of this, and is unusual amongst the group, being predominantly black, with little of the canvas left unpainted. It’s unclear what is part of the car and what is the figure: there is just a complex weaving of lines and colours, waiting to be deciphered. The only clue -apart from its title- that this painting depicts anything, is the disjointed figure whose orange hair and beard are only separated by an oversized pair of wraparound sunglasses.
Easy visual comparisons can and have been made between Wylie and painters such as Basquiat and Guston; although it is also possible to detect a direct lineage from post-war British abstraction, in particular Roger Hilton, whose drawings bear a striking resemblance to Wylie’s, or Sandra Blow, who was just ten years older than Wylie, and became an honorary Royal Academician at the same time that Wylie and her partner-to-be, Roy Oxlade studied there in the early 70’s. Blow worked in a very similar manner to Wylie, combining collage with painting on an equally epic scale. As well as Hilton, Blow and Wylie herself, many artists of the 50’s and 60’s were of course influenced by the introduction of the Abstract Expressionists to Europe, via the Tate’s large show of their work in 1959; Wylie’s contemporary Basil Beattie, who later rejected pure abstraction, recalls seeing the exhibition: “I came away with the feeling that Abstract Expressionism was what I would actually call ‘realism’”. He goes on to say, “…there was a vividness and intensity of experience (in) witnessing those canvases…the work reached a height of ‘real’ experience”.4 This idea of realness is an interesting one: questions about what is abstract in painting, and what is ‘real’, prevail; and if they are, in fact, one and the same thing? As Wylie has said, her paintings are not about anything; the painting is the painting. Therefore anything ‘real’ in the work only comes from her direct experience, and her scrupulous treatment of, the paint itself. Wylie stays true to her materials, allowing them to be at the forefront and to take precedence over any ‘image’. The best of Wylie’s work certainly possesses this realness in abundance.
Both Wylie and Beattie have a confident directness in their paintings and a broadness of brush, dictated by the paint and the way it demands to be handled. The paintings have a physical presence that allows the viewer’s experience to be guided by their body rather than their mind. Although Beattie’s language of architectural forms, constructed from elemental shapes, lends itself to known abstract tropes, Wylie’s subjects are painted in such a way that are perhaps are no less abstract. And regardless of the imagery or motifs used, both artists try to evoke their own memory of place or emotion, of things that have no visibility, rather than abstracting from something seen. Just as a Rothko’s work was misunderstood as depictions of sunsets, a Wylie might be misunderstood as being about a day in the life of a girl called Lolita.
Wylie’s paintings are hard to pin down or pigeonhole. They are the product of a lifetime’s worth of experience and influences, delivered to the canvas with the lethal marksmanship of a Tarantino assassin, by Wylie’s choice of weapon, the loaded brush. There’s a lot going on in the paintings. Sometimes, for me, they can be too busy and don’t always hit the mark, appearing too slapstick, and occasionally slipping on their own comedic banana skin. “Park Dogs, Woof Woof” is one, I feel, that falls short, with the imagery dominating, and verging on the cartoonish or the illustrative; it is almost a pastiche of her own work. Nevertheless, whether she succeeds or fails, it is her dance along the fine line that separates the two outcomes that makes these paintings so exciting.
It’s a shame that she lived so long only in the paintings of her late husband, Roy Oxlade, and that for many years she was not so proactive as an artist in her own right. I don’t think I’m being overly cynical, knowing how fickle the art market is, to say that it took his death, or at least the end of his career, for her to be allowed a place in the spotlight, working in front of the canvases instead of appearing in them. It may be the case that they shared ideologies: there was undoubtedly mutual respect and common ground in their approach to painting.
But now, at 83 years young, Rose Wylie is speaking in her own voice.
At 86, British Artist Rose Wylie Doesn’t Really Know Why She’s Suddenly an Art Star. She’s Just Trying to Enjoy It
Wylie’s US solo debut has just opened at the Aspen Art Museum.
Naomi Rea for ArtNet.com. July 21, 2020.
As the pandemic shuttered museums across the globe it kicked off a backlog of exhibition planning, leaving many artists rightfully worried that their newly “postponed” show might ultimately become a canceled one.
The artist Rose Wylie was one of the lucky ones. At 86, Wylie is a treasure of the UK art world, though she only gained market traction relatively late in her career (the mega-gallerist David Zwirner took her on in 2017). Her first US museum solo, at the Aspen Art Museum, was initially slated to open in March, but was finally able to open this month and will run through November.
Titled “where i am and was,” the show tracks Wylie’s career through 14 paintings from the 1990s through to the present, as well as a number of preparatory drawings, concept sketches, and ephemera.
“The nice thing about museum shows is that you can put in works which are sold and dispersed around the place,” Wylie tells Artnet News. “You can get together work for the quality of the work.”
Life in Lockdown
I spoke to Wylie from her home in Kent. Her age puts her in a group of the population that is more vulnerable to the coronavirus, but she is not at home just because of the pandemic.
“It’s easy to say that I would go [to the opening] under normal circumstances, but I wouldn’t,” Wylie says. The artist doesn’t like flying, so she doesn’t go to private views outside of driving distance. She hopes that one thing to come out of the pandemic is a reversal on the amount of air travel that takes place in the art world.
The artist is spending lockdown at home, where she has been hard at work in her studio. “I’m in wonderfully complete isolation with my cat,” she says. Pete, whom she says is “nearly human,” is her constant companion.
“One of the positive things is there are fewer interruptions,” she says. But the harsh realities of the outside world find a way to intrude, and the artist throws herself into work to cope. “I think for me painting is an escape from all that, because it’s completely separate, even if you might use it, it’s under your control.”
Wylie’s paintings take inspiration from things she encounters in her day to day life, such as newspapers, art history, films, and even advertising. “It’s not to do with the psychology or the plot or anything, it’s just the visual excitement,” she says. “Something stops me in my tracks, and I think I’ll go make a drawing of it because I simply want to remember it.”
She has just finished a new painting inspired by illuminated manuscripts that she stumbled across while surfing the web.
Wylie’s US Debut
The paintings on view in Aspen speak to some of the constants throughout Wylie’s career, including explorations of the power of celebrity and how women are represented in visual culture.
A visitor might recognize several faces on view, reproduced in the artist’s expressive and colorful strokes, including the star tennis player Serena Williams. Wylie says that she has returned to Williams as a subject several times because she likes the way the tennis player counters expectations about how she “should” look.
“It’s easy to misinterpret what I am doing,” Wylie says. “It’s not because she is a woman, and it is not because she is Black, but she seems to be someone who is herself, her physique is very powerful, and she is a superb player.”
The artist has also turned her brush to some famous soccer players, from Wayne Rooney to Thierry Henry, inspired from the days when she used to watch Match of the Day with her husband in the evenings (he died in 2014). “People think I’m crazy about football—I’m not, but they are kind of like gods out there, people know and they recognize them, so it is an entry point into the work for them.”
Moving Forward
The exhibition title prompts me to ask Wylie about how the reception of her work has changed over the years.
“For a long time, I painted and no one paid anything the slightest attention,” she says. “I never quite understood why because in a sense I’m completely mainstream.” Wylie has an art school background, complete with a Master’s degree from the Royal College of Art. But for a long time her paintings sat gathering dust on her studio floor. She muses that her more intuitive and non-academic style did not speak to people, until all of a sudden it did.
“I don’t know why since I hadn’t changed and the work hadn’t changed, but institutions, gallerists, and collectors changed their minds. It beats me,” Wylie says.
Though she acknowledges that museums have come a long way in improving the gender balance of their collections, she says there is still further to go. “When I was an art student, the stuff in museums was all male,” she says. “It’s still not as it should be, but it’s better.”
Being thrust into the spotlight has been invigorating for the artist, who says she is comforted knowing that the new work she makes will go up in a gallery rather than languish in the studio. Having the backing of a serious gallery like Zwirner also seems to have helped collectors to see the quality in her work.
But the artist gets irritated when people suggest the belated attention has come because she is older. “I don’t want to be known for my age, it’s irrelevant, and I don’t want one of the justifications to be because the paintings are done by an old women,” she says. “It should be the work that gets the attention.”
Coming up next, Wylie will have another solo exhibition at the Hangaram Art Museum at Seoul Arts Center in December. Next March she will open her first solo exhibition with David Zwirner in New York.
“Rose Wylie: where i am and was” is on view at Aspen Art Museum through November 1.
https://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/rose-wylie/survey