Wylie's artwork boldly confronts complex themes such as politics, religion, and love, merging high and low culture through innovative mark-making techniques. Her unique use of material overlay and erasure results in striking compositions that balance formal and informal aesthetics. This monograph showcases her latest work from four exhibitions at David Zwirner, enriched by insights from Judith Bernstein, essays by Barry Schwabsky and David Salle, and an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, all reflecting Wylie's feminist and rebellious spirit.
Celebrated British painter Rose Wylie—whose works are at once tactile, cerebral, and humorous—often draws her influence from a wide range of popular culture. Here her newest body of work references memories from her own life and mimics the way memories evolve and change over time. Wylie’s source material is culled from the vast visual world around her, ranging from sixteenth-century British estates to Serena Williams and the French Open. While initially these may seem random or aesthetically simplistic, through the nuanced use of humor, language, and compositional structure, Wylie creates wittily observed and subtly sophisticated meditations on the nature of memory, and visual representation itself, in line with the paintings she has become known for over the course of her career. A new essay by art critic Michael Glover explores the remarkable painter whose work has “spark, assurance, brash humor, an extraordinary, freewheeling eclecticism that seems to be just as ready to suck in references to the art of Ptolemaic Egypt and Roman portraiture as to pay homage to the films of Quentin Tarantino and the late paintings of Philip Guston.” Part of David Zwirner Books’s Spotlight Series, this book features Wylie’s newest paintings and drawings and is published on the occasion of the artist’s 2020 solo exhibition of these works at David Zwirner Hong Kong.
STEIDL-WERK No. 24: Collisions explores the creative influences and personal friendship between artists Rose Wylie and Fraser Taylor, and is a mixed-media survey of their careers to date. Designed by WERK creator director Theseus Chan, the book also archives an intense three-day experiment with Wylie and Taylor working simultaneously and led by curator Alison Harley. In response to Wylie and Taylor's extensive creative practice, artists Jimmy Cosgrove, Jeff Gibbons, Ian Massey, Jo Melvin and Liam Scully were invited by Harley to create open forms of writing that Chan then integrated into the book as text collages. Central to this collaboration are notions of commonality and difference, as well as Wylie and Taylor's emphasis on graphic materiality and spontaneity: Taylor is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in drawings that move between figuration and abstraction, while Wylie declares: "Draw what you see, or remember; use everything at your disposal ... including 'sparkle,' wandering wispy lines for ghosts, soft zigzags for heat (and steam), and cross-hatching, foreshortening ... use what you've got." Documentary photos by Oona Brown round off the book and transport us to the original site of Wylie and Taylor's "collisions."
