Rose Wylie. Flick and Float
Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern
19 July - 5 October 2025
Rose Wylie in her studio, June 2023 Photograph: Will Grundy
© Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Rose Wylie. Flick and Float presents the nonconformist and fascinating work of the British artist Rose Wylie (b. 1934). Her unique artistic practice has won her international recognition. In her large-format paintings, Rose Wylie strips down figurative representations to their essentials. Expressive, direct and full of subversive humour, these works testify to her engagement with pop culture, film and art history. With more than fifty paintings and around a dozen drawings, the Zentrum Paul Klee is showing a retrospective of Wylie’s work over the last thirty years. New works have been made for the exhibition.
Dinner Outside, 2024
Oil on canvas, 183 × 328 cm, two parts
© Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Photo: Jack Hems
Lilith and Gucci Boy, 2024
Oil on canvas, 207 × 306 cm, two parts
© Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Photo: Jack Hems
Rose Wylie - An unconventional career: from reading to seeing
The ninety-year-old artist lives and works in a cottage not far from London. Rose Wylie received her artistic training at Folkestone and Dover School of Art, Goldsmiths College and the Royal College of Art in London. While raising her three children, she put her artistic career on pause, and, alongside her family life, spent a lot of time reading books. It was not until the late 1990s that seeing took over from reading again, as Rose Wylie explained on a visit to her studio in March 2024. She started devoting herself intensively to painting again, and finally achieved international recognition with her unique work and major solo exhibitions, at Tate Britain in London and elsewhere. The Zentrum Paul Klee is devoting a major retrospective to Rose Wylie featuring over fifty paintings and around a dozen drawings. The artist has painted eight works specially for the exhibition, which are being shown to a museum-going public for the first time in the Zentrum Paul Klee.
Jesus of Prague, 1989
Oil on canvas, 184 × 183 cm
© Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Photo: Anna Arca
Manor, 2004
Oil on canvas, 183 × 188 cm
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Photo: Soon-Hak Kwon
© Rose Wylie
Photograph courtesy of Jari Lager
The Fat Controller, 2006
Oil on canvas, 366 × 248 cm, four parts
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Photo: Soon-Hak Kwon
© Rose Wylie
Photograph courtesy of Jari Lager
Rose Wylie - Inspiration from pop culture, film and art history
Rose Wylie’s large-format works, made in the studio on the first floor of her cottage, reflect a deep understanding of pop culture, film and art history. She often works with a subversive humour that also connects her to Paul Klee. Stripped down to its essentials, and with a highly expressive lightness of touch, her artistic language references an aesthetic of ‘bad painting’ and post pop. On closer examination, Wylie’s works prove to be sharply observed and subtly polished meditations on the nature of humanity.
Singing Life Model, 2017
Oil on canvas, 169 × 182 cm
Karen and Mark Smith
© Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Photo: Anna Arca
Yellow Strip, 2006
Oil on canvas, 183 × 777 cm, five parts
© Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Photo: Jack Hems
For Rose Wylie, the process by which a painting is made often begins with a visual stimulus. No limits are placed on her inspiration. As indicated by the title of the exhibition, Flick and Float – the artist’s own suggestion – in her working process Wylie ‘flicks’ through a flood of images until a motif attracts her attention. The motif might be a newspaper photograph on her studio floor, a scene from a film, an everyday situation from her life, an artwork or a picture that she found while surfing the internet. What the motifs share, however, is always a special detail that does not match the norm – ‘Toujours la difference!’ is a phrase of which Rose Wylie is particularly fond. So for example, in Singing Life Model, Rose Wylie shows a photographic model posing with a strangely opened mouth, while Yellow Strip shows the football star Ronaldinho with his characteristically thin pony tail, which whips in time with his every movement on the pitch.
Rose Wylie - Painting from memory
Rose Wylie usually begins by capturing her visual impressions in drawings. The drawings in the exhibition provide an insight into her creative process. Rose Wylie does not return to the reference material, but with a few strokes reduces the picture in her memory to what she sees as essential. Speaking of her ‘Film Notes’, for example, she explains:
‘When I do film paintings, I usually work from memory […] – I do not go back to the film or to film stills to check… It’s the original visual excitement I want to work with.’
Rose Wylie, on the letter ‘F’ in the A–Z of the catalogue Rose Wylie. Flick and Float
Rose Wylie then reworks the drawing until the composition and central details are consistent. If lines have to be corrected, Rose Wylie does not erase them, but sticks a new piece of paper over them, which sometimes makes the sketches look like collages. This process of discovery is also repeated on the big canvases in Wylie’s studio. Where necessary, Rose Wylie scrapes the oil paint off again and adds whole new parts of canvases. This genesis provides the second part of the exhibition title, because Rose Wylie describes the process by which her works are created as ‘floating’.
Rose Wylie - Compositional investigations with picture and writing
Bagdad Cafe (Film Notes), 2015
Oil on canvas, 182 × 372 cm, two parts
Courtesy of the British Council Collection
Photo: Soon-Hak Kwon
© Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist
Photograph courtesy of Jari Lager
Rose Wylie develops pictorial compositions that go beyond traditional perspectival representation. In her multi-panel works, for example, she juxtaposes apparently disparate images, giving rise to visual rhymes and resonances. One example is the two-part work Bagdad Cafe (Film Notes): while in the left half of the painting Rose Wylie reworks visual stimuli from the film of the same name, in the right half she shows scenes from her everyday life – including a flower from her garden, her own mouth when eating and a coffee stain.
‘I spell often phonetically – I paint how things look and I spell how things sound.’
Rose Wylie, in an interview with Fabienne Eggelhöfer during a visit to her studio in January 2025
Rose Wylie also includes writing as part of the composition of her works. What is central here is not so much the content of what is written as the form and arrangement of the letters on the picture surface. She places the writing deliberately to perfect her compositions. The process of writing is more important than the correct way of writing. For this reason Rose Wylie often writes words as she hears them, spelled incorrectly. Her writing style can be experienced in the A–Z section of the exhibition catalogue. In reflections on 26 ideas, Rose Wylie provides a deeper insight into her intellectual world.
Rose Wylie - Biography
Rose Wylie was born in 1934 in Hythe, in Kent in England. She lived with her family in India until the age of five. Her return to England coincided with the outbreak of the Second World War, which Rose Wylie experienced as a child.
Beginning in 1952 she studied painting at Folkestone and Dover School of Art. From 1956 she continued her training at Goldsmiths College in London with a view to teaching. It was here that she met her husband, the artist Roy Oxlade. When their first child was born she put her artistic career on pause and concentrated on the family. In the 1970s she taught painting at Sittingbourne College of Further Education. From 1979 she resumed her artistic activity by studying for a Masters at the Royal College of Art in London.
She began to submit her works for exhibitions with an open application procedure, which was how she came to be selected by Neo Rauch for EAST International at Norwich University of the Arts in 2004. In 2010 her works were shown in the exhibition Women to Watch at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, which led the feminist Germaine Greer to describe her as the ‘hottest new artist’ in an article in The Guardian. In 2013 she had her first institutional solo exhibition at Tate Britain in London, and won the renowned John Moores Painting Prize the following year. She was also appointed a Senior Royal Academician of the Royal Academy in London. Further exhibitions followed, including shows at the Serpentine Gallery in London (2017), in the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo in Málaga (2017), Aspen Art Museum in Colorado (2020), Hangaram Art Museum in Seoul (2021) and the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) in Ghent (2022) to name only a few. Next year her works will be shown at the Royal Academy in London.
Rose Wylie. Flick and Float Catalogue of the exhibition ; Snoeck Verlag, 2025
Published by Fabienne Eggelhöfer and Nina Zimmer
With an A–Z by Rose Wylie, photographs by Juergen Teller,
as well as a foreword by Nina Zimmer,
Director of the Kunstmuseum Bern – Zentrum Paul Klee,
and an introduction by Fabienne Eggelhöfer,
Chief Curator at the Zentrum Paul Klee.
136 pages ; Language: English ; ISBN 978-3-86442-464-9
Curator: Fabienne Eggelhöfer
Curatorial assistant: Josephine Rechberg
ZENTRUM PAUL KLEE
Monument im Fruchtland 3, 3006 Bern
