Rose Wylie

Rose Wylie. Flick and Float presents the nonconformist and fascinating work of the British artist Rose Wylie. She has won global recognition with her unique artistic practice and wide range of themes. Wylie's large-format paintings are a mixture of figurative representation, abstraction and stories in pictures. Expressive, direct and filled with subversive humour, they bear witness to the artist's engagement with pop culture, literature, history, and personal experiences. Wylie's artistic language is deliberately simple, and recalls the aesthetic of Bad Painting and Post-Pop. With works from the last thirty years, the book provides an insight into the untamed oe uvre of an artist who overcomes conventional boundaries and occupies a unique place in the contemporary art scene. Individual works are also being painted specially for the exhibition in Bern, and shown to the public for the first time, just as Juergen Teller's photographs, in their inimitable way, introduce us to the artists' world in her different way.

“Wylie fearlessly tackles the thorniest topics head-on, committing her thoughts and questions about politics, religion, fame, love, history, money and nature to canvas.” — Charlotte Brook, Harper’s Bazaar Inspired by film, pop culture, and the history of fashion as she experienced personally, Wylie harnesses a union of high and low culture with a bold technique of mark making. Her unique practice of material overlay and erasure creates fantastic compositions. Creating conceptual tensions between formal and informal aesthetics, Wylie employs the visual elements of text as formal details in her paintings. With a beautiful swiss binding, this monograph compiles the work of four exhibitions at David Zwirner offering a full breadth of Wylie’s most recent work to date. Giving insight and compassion to Wylie’s feminist and rebellious impulses, Judith Bernstein writes an accompanying text on how she relates to Wylie’s ambitious and playful energy. With a foreword by Nicholas Serota, this publication also features new essays by Barry Schwabsky and David Salle and an enlightening interview between the artist and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Set on a remote island, Shakespeare’s The Tempest is an ideal subject for artist Rose Wylie, whose work frequently references classic stories and well-known characters. Likely the last play written entirely by Shakespeare, The Tempest brings together various themes the bard explored in his prior plays, including magic, revenge and forgiveness, order and society, and nature versus art. The shipwreck and remote island, the spirits, and the dukes and their children, offer rich material for Wylie’s works on paper and canvas. As the third title in David Zwirner Books’s Seeing Shakespeare series, this book pairs a complex narrative with equally layered works by a contemporary artist who approaches the play and art-making from a unique perspective.

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.