Rose Wylie @ Turner Contemporary, Margate, Kent

Rose Wylie
Turner Contemporary, Margate, Kent
12 January - 31 March 2016

Rose Wylie 

Pink Table Cloth (Close-up) (Film Notes), 2013. 

Oil on Canvas 207 x 330 cm. 

Image courtesy of the artist and UNION Gallery, London.

To open 2016 in Turner Contemporary’s ground floor Sunley Gallery, the world-class gallery is showing a group of paintings and works on paper by celebrated Kent-based artist Rose Wylie.

Wylie’s bold, large-scale figurative paintings draw on ancient and folk art, such as Mexican street art and contemporary Egyptian Hajj painting, as well as art history and film. Their deliberate awkwardness, closer to the unselfconscious art of children, includes a collage-like approach in which mistakes are simply covered up with patches of cut-up canvas or paper.

This display, the first time the Sunley gallery has been used for painting, includes seven large-scale paintings, which can be viewed at balcony and ground floor level, as well as eight works on paper.

The inspiration for Wylie’s paintings often comes from a particular sight or visual moment that strikes her with a “special quality” that she tries to capture through her own language of painting. The Manufacturers, for example, originated from a newspaper photograph of a public apology by toy company Mattel, whose particular symmetry and formality reminded Wylie of Spanish 16th century still-life painting.

Rose Wylie 

Theatre Painting (Black Spots), 2015. 

Oil on Canvas 183 x 322 cm. 

Image courtesy of the artist and UNION Gallery, London.

The display also includes four works from Film Notes, a series of paintings inspired by remembered images from contemporary films. An avid and discerning film fan, her recent paintings and drawings have paid homage to directors as diverse as François Ozon, Werner Herzog, Claudia Llosa and Quentin Tarantino. Drawn to theatricality and fascinated by costume, Wylie responds to the dramatic and surreal image of a secret meeting in the desert from the film Syriana in Pink Tablecloth (Close Up) and Pink Tablecloth (Long Shot). In Bagdad Café (Film Notes) Wylie uses text to focus attention on the ‘white frock’ which is her equivalent to actor Marianne Sägebrecht’s iconic brown pleated suit and hat in the film.

Rose Wylie

Rose Wylie was born in Kent, where she still lives and works. She studied at Folkestone and Dover School of Art (1952-6) and the Royal College of Art, London (1979-81) and now, in her early eighties, is enjoying renewed interest in her work in the UK and internationally with recent exhibitions at the Jerwood, Hastings (2012) and Tate Britain (BP Spotlight, 2013), as well as winning the prestigious John Moores painting prize in 2014. In 2010, Wylie was described by Germaine Greer as ‘Britain’s hottest new artist’.

Turner Contemporary 
Rendezvous, Margate, CT9 1HG
www.turnercontemporary.org