The Unapologetic Art of Rose Wylie

HUR CONVERSATIONS

Apr 8

Rose Wylie

The Unapologetic Art of Rose Wylie

By Bonnie Langedijk

Rose Wylie doesn’t overthink it. The 90-year-old painter—whose sprawling canvases disrupt proportion, perspective, and convention with deliberate, playful imprecision—works on instinct. A collision of pop culture, art history, and personal memory, her paintings have a singular ability to capture moments with a childlike directness.

Uncomplicated in form, yet vast in meaning, Wylie’s work seems a quiet rebellion against the pretentiousness often associated with art. As she tells it, art shouldn’t be difficult or intimidating. A late bloomer in the art world, the British artist received mainstream recognition well into her seventies. Now, with solo shows across major institutions and collectors clamoring for her work, she remains as unfiltered and instinctive as ever.

Her upcoming exhibition at David Zwirner in London, When Found Becomes Given, features new and recent canvases and multi-panel works that blend personal, symbolic, and historical elements. The show precedes Wylie’s solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, opening in February 2026.

Wylie’s independent spirit shines through in her refusal to paint for expectation. Her work carries a playful defiance, and with it, she challenges the very idea of what painting should be.

*Rose Wylie Dinner Outside, 2024 Oil on canvas © Rose Wylie Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.*

Bonnie: As an artist, there are often people explaining your work for you. For someone who has never seen a Rose Wylie before, how would you describe it in your own words?

Rose: I would describe it as a line. It's very straightforward. I think people think art is difficult or they think there's something they should know about, or it's about a film they should have seen. That's not the case. I think they should just look at it, feel it, enter into it or enjoy it. It's figurative. The things in it are available. There's no mystique. It could be a curtain in my house, a fork, a person in a film. A lot of people see films, it's accessible. You can watch them on the sofa. I have just done a ballet painting, but that's because I saw it on television. Some people say it's immediate. And it is, but I also go back and forth and I change my mind. It's painted immediately, but the process of how it comes about can be quite involved.

Where do you think this idea of art being difficult comes from?

Rose: I think it's pushed. The way some people talk about it is very traditional. There are a lot of smart words and the contents can be quite frightening for some people. They may prefer football. I think my work is accessible. If I'm painting a buttercup, it doesn't look like a daisy or a carrot. It looks like a buttercup.

“It's very straightforward. I think people think art is DIFFICULT or they think there's something they should know about, or it's about a film they should have seen. That's not the case.”

When you decide what you depict in a painting is the filter that it needs to be understandable or connected to popular culture?

Rose: To picture something, I have to find the shot in the film literally exciting. It's not about the psychology of the person, it's not about something distant and unavailable to you.

As your work often refers to important cultural figures, important cultural moments, what do you think about culture today? What do you think this age will be remembered for?

Rose: I don't know. I think something rather bleak. Films are hugely interesting, but in terms of change or climate, it's not a good time.

Agreed. I read somewhere that you don't like constraints. What's the biggest constraint you've ever had to push against?

It's probably the gap between coming out of the art scene and then returning to being an obsessed professional artist. It doesn't work very well because you should be young to do the sort of work you're doing, but you're not. You've had time out bringing up children. And at that point, being a woman didn't help either. If you come out of art school, you should start getting into the gallery system, you should start getting your work out there and working professionally, not marrying and having children. One of our children needed special help. So to answer your question, there was a gap in my production.

I don’t think that has changed yet.

Rose: There’s this question whether or not to push your ego or your own position. But if you do leave your children with somebody else to look after them, or if you continue painting while you bring up children, it doesn't work because painting takes up your whole time. Your emotional time, your interest, and therefore everything to do with your children is an interruption. It's an irritation. And they feel that, and they feel marginalized. They feel to a degree neglected. I mean, not badly neglected, but your mind is somewhere else. I didn't do that and it turned out okay.

Earlier you mentioned your process being immediate, but also that you go back and consider things again.

Rose: Well, it's both. First there's the impulse, something that's satisfactory. But then you change your mind about it and the painting moves and you go back and you change it. But I don't correct for correction's sake. I will only correct it if I otherwise don't want to look at it.

Interesting. So, how do you know when it's done?

Rose: Well, when I think it's all right, when you believe it. Often it doesn't look right. That's not what you want. If you want this thing to belong to you, you've got to work at it. Period. Bring it on, slap it on, start it off.

*Rose Wylie Opera Singer & Teapot, 2024 Oil on canvas © Rose Wylie Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.*

*Rose Wylie, No.19, Autre magazine, Sittingbourne, 2024 © Juergen Teller, All Rights Reserved Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.*

When I think about your work, there are often distorted proportions, off kilter perspectives. There's these playful imperfections. How do you relate to that concept of a certain type of wrongness?

Rose: Imperfection can be perfection.

I agree.

Rose: Wrongness can be right. It depends on the type of wrongness. You just keep going until it looks right. It's all about the judgment. In my opinion, it should have something to do with the subject I'm painting. If it gets too distorted, I'll perhaps bring it back to look a bit more like the subject. Also, it isn't necessarily distortion. It's also playful. I think, if you make the head a bit bigger it can look alright. If you make it much smaller, it can look alright. Sometimes if it's in between, if it's too close to normality, it doesn't transform into something new that you discovered. It's about discovering and intervention and pushing. There's no certain recipe or solution. You don't want it to always look the same.

You have an upcoming exhibition at David Zwirner in April called When Found becomes Given. The name kind of suggests there's this transformation of discovery into offering.

Rose: When you paint, you are perhaps looking for something which hasn't been... Well, I can give you an example of a painting I've just done. Often, if the scene is outside, I put little strokes of grass, to signify the outside. If it's light, I often put up a moon. It’s a way of telling the audience [something]. In this particular painting, I put two cars in a car park and the car park had pebbles, but I've never painted peddles before. Grass has become something which is acceptable. It's a given in my work. But the pebbles are something I just found and struck me. When something becomes a given, nothing changes. It's about perception. It's going from subjectivity to objectivity. It's slightly philosophical.

It's also an interesting experiment to see the people who visit the space question or wonder. What is something you hope people who visit the show take away from it?

Rose: Well, I hope it makes them feel better. I want them to feel interested or affected. I don't want to make people feel bleak. Someone said to me the other day that the paintings were poignant and he didn't mean [they were] sad. He meant they were deeply affecting. I think if they affected you and you remember something about it, that’s interesting. There's a lot of stuff that flashes in and flashes out. Painting is more permanent. It’s static while most of the world is moving. It has a kind of ability to stick with you, like a good film, a good book or a good piece of music.

What I love about your work is that it feels very direct. It feels unapologetic. You're not in any way afraid of what you want put on the canvas.

Rose: I'm an unapologetic woman. Take it or leave it. I'm not a politician.

That’s refreshing. Do you think art should take up space? Both physically—because your paintings are quite big—but also metaphorically?

Rose: I don't know why they're big. I think at a certain time I felt that men did big paintings and women perhaps had less available to them, or maybe they worked in a smaller studio or they had less to work with. So I thought, well, let's get on with it. The bigger, the better. I don't like stuff to be contained. I like stuff opening up and growing and having the possibility of change.

You often use words in your paintings. What do you believe words can do in a painting that images alone can't?

Rose: They're easier. It's much easier to paint letters than to paint a face because there's more that can go wrong with a face. Also, letters have a toughness. We all know about them. Their familiarity allows you to experiment more with where you put them, [their] size. The trouble is people read the words and don't look at the image. I think that images are more important than words.

*Rose Wylie Lilith and Gucci Boy, 2024 Oil on canvas © Rose Wylie Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.*

There's something so universal about words. As you said, everyone understands them.

Rose: Yes, you can deal with it while maybe you can't deal with the image. [Someone might] think it's the wrong way to approach an image, but with words you know how [to approach it]. I think maybe words do give gravitas and status or weight but it's the image I'm interested in. The words go with it.

To go back to the image, when you are working on a painting, do you spend a lot of time finding references on the internet? Or do you find them in books or in newspapers?

Rose: Well, all of those things. The Internet has a huge richness of image. You can just spend time looking at architecture, other pictures, ancient pictures. A little while ago I saw a tile at the British Museum with a woman on it, and it was a Babylonian tile. I thought it was a good image because it wasn’t European, it wasn’t distorted, it was simple. So I drew it. Then I found out what it portrayed.

Yes.

Rose: I saw Wim Wender's film on Anselm Kiefer and in it, Kiefer was talking about poetry and meaning. In a throwaway stick he mentioned Adam's first wife. I thought Adam's wife was Eve. I started looking into it and I found out that the drawing that I had made of the Babylonian tile was in fact Lilith. It’s a very feminist idea, the fact that Lilith was made from the same earth as Adam and was made at the same time. She felt she was equal to Adam, but Adam felt he was the superior being. She didn't like his attitude. and he thought she wasn't submissive so he kicked her out or she left. I didn't know any of that. For me, it was an exciting piece of discovery. Did you know that story?

I didn't.

Rose: Not everybody does. It's all been whitewashed out.

That's what's great about the internet sometimes, that you can just go down these rabbit holes.

Rose: It's huge. It's very good. I love the story [of Lilith]. We should all know about it. But in the British museum, she isn't called Lilith. She's called Queen of the Night. Her feet are wrong. Like birds. They've demonized her.

Classic.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.