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Lot Essay
‘The rawness, the changes of scale, and the conjunction of high and low culture all combine to give her paintings an extraordinary sense of the present day’ (Nicholas Serota)
Included in Rose Wylie’s 2022 survey at the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Tube Girl (2016) is an impressive example of the artist’s singular painterly language. A linear female figure floats across two joined raw canvases, her body rendered in ribbons of thick, tactile umber paint and haloed by an ochre glow. Her black hair flickers like a naked flame, while flashes of red nail polish adorn her toes. A roughly scrawled text, littered with misspellings and patched corrections, denotes a ‘very stylish and slender African model’. Wylie—the subject of a major retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts, London this spring—is celebrated for her freewheeling painterly style, drawing together eclectic influences and source imagery. Dedicated on the front of the canvas as a homage to the Malian photographer Malick Sidibé, the present work subverts the commercialisation of the female body, offering a witty riposte to centuries of art history’s reclining female nudes.
Wylie is one of Britain’s preeminent artists. After attending art school in the 1950s, she returned to painting once her children had grown up, graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1981. The present work dates from a period that witnessed a major surge of critical interest in her practice, with solo exhibitions at institutions including the Jerwood Gallery, Tate Britain and the Serpentine Sackler Gallery between 2012 and 2017. She was awarded the John Moores Painting Prize in 2014, and the prestigious Charles Wollaston Award at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition the following year. Bold, tactile and colourful, her works draw upon a staggering range of ideas, depicting everything from historical monarchs and Ancient Egyptian wall paintings to ducks and premiership footballers. Working on unstretched and unprimed canvas, she gleefully subverts the conventions of figurative painting, playing with composition, perspective and form. Wylie’s sources of inspiration are rich and diverse, ranging from the works of El Greco and Sigmar Polke to the films of Quentin Tarantino. The present work flickers with echoes of Philip Guston, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, its surface alive with the trace of her hand.
For all their freedom and spontaneity, Wylie’s compositions are carefully planned, with extensive research, drawing and visual note-taking forming a key part of her process. Tube Girl bears witness to this approach. The work has its origins in two smaller-scale studies of the same year, both entitled Tube Girls. Each is scrawled with jottings that refer to a photograph of the Namibian model Venantia Otto published in the 2009 Livingstone Calendar. Wylie’s notes on one of the studies include a prompt to ‘look up Malick Sidibé’, known for his black-and-white images of 1960s pop culture in Bamako. Wylie produced two further works related to these studies, including Face of Africa, Wall (2016)—titled after a competition won by Otto in 2006—and Long Brown Girl, Life Drawing (2023). Elsewhere, she has spoken of the influence of the Mosque of Córdoba, whose colours—‘flowerpot-orange on stone putty’—provided inspiration for Tube Girl (R. Wylie, quoted in A. Walker, ‘Rose Wylie’s cultural highlights’, The Guardian, 22 July 2018).
This transfiguration of source imagery is typical of Wylie’s practice. Her paintings are often inspired by an initial fragment—a film still, a clipping from a newspaper, an image from a magazine—which is then filtered and modified through memory and imagination. Works such as the present have the quality of dreamlike storyboards, their cinematic scale immersing the viewer in a world of incomplete narratives and associations. In Tube Girl, the reclining nudes of Western art history flit in and out of the shadows: from Velázquez and Titian to Manet and Matisse. Ultimately, however, all are subsumed by Wylie’s own voice, poking fun at the male gaze. ‘Her approach to form’, explains fellow painter David Salle, ‘is boldly idiosyncratic; her brush shoots around the whole body, and the way she paints people is like stylised Morse code: the eyes and mouths often reduced to mere dots and dashes, the hair a mass of wavy brushstrokes’ (D. Salle, ‘Going on Her Nerve’, in Rose Wylie: Which One, exh. cat. David Zwirner Gallery, New York 2021, p. 196). This assessment is vividly borne out here: through extraordinary economy of means, Wylie’s figure takes on a powerful life of her own.
Included in Rose Wylie’s 2022 survey at the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Tube Girl (2016) is an impressive example of the artist’s singular painterly language. A linear female figure floats across two joined raw canvases, her body rendered in ribbons of thick, tactile umber paint and haloed by an ochre glow. Her black hair flickers like a naked flame, while flashes of red nail polish adorn her toes. A roughly scrawled text, littered with misspellings and patched corrections, denotes a ‘very stylish and slender African model’. Wylie—the subject of a major retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts, London this spring—is celebrated for her freewheeling painterly style, drawing together eclectic influences and source imagery. Dedicated on the front of the canvas as a homage to the Malian photographer Malick Sidibé, the present work subverts the commercialisation of the female body, offering a witty riposte to centuries of art history’s reclining female nudes.
Wylie is one of Britain’s preeminent artists. After attending art school in the 1950s, she returned to painting once her children had grown up, graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1981. The present work dates from a period that witnessed a major surge of critical interest in her practice, with solo exhibitions at institutions including the Jerwood Gallery, Tate Britain and the Serpentine Sackler Gallery between 2012 and 2017. She was awarded the John Moores Painting Prize in 2014, and the prestigious Charles Wollaston Award at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition the following year. Bold, tactile and colourful, her works draw upon a staggering range of ideas, depicting everything from historical monarchs and Ancient Egyptian wall paintings to ducks and premiership footballers. Working on unstretched and unprimed canvas, she gleefully subverts the conventions of figurative painting, playing with composition, perspective and form. Wylie’s sources of inspiration are rich and diverse, ranging from the works of El Greco and Sigmar Polke to the films of Quentin Tarantino. The present work flickers with echoes of Philip Guston, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, its surface alive with the trace of her hand.
For all their freedom and spontaneity, Wylie’s compositions are carefully planned, with extensive research, drawing and visual note-taking forming a key part of her process. Tube Girl bears witness to this approach. The work has its origins in two smaller-scale studies of the same year, both entitled Tube Girls. Each is scrawled with jottings that refer to a photograph of the Namibian model Venantia Otto published in the 2009 Livingstone Calendar. Wylie’s notes on one of the studies include a prompt to ‘look up Malick Sidibé’, known for his black-and-white images of 1960s pop culture in Bamako. Wylie produced two further works related to these studies, including Face of Africa, Wall (2016)—titled after a competition won by Otto in 2006—and Long Brown Girl, Life Drawing (2023). Elsewhere, she has spoken of the influence of the Mosque of Córdoba, whose colours—‘flowerpot-orange on stone putty’—provided inspiration for Tube Girl (R. Wylie, quoted in A. Walker, ‘Rose Wylie’s cultural highlights’, The Guardian, 22 July 2018).
This transfiguration of source imagery is typical of Wylie’s practice. Her paintings are often inspired by an initial fragment—a film still, a clipping from a newspaper, an image from a magazine—which is then filtered and modified through memory and imagination. Works such as the present have the quality of dreamlike storyboards, their cinematic scale immersing the viewer in a world of incomplete narratives and associations. In Tube Girl, the reclining nudes of Western art history flit in and out of the shadows: from Velázquez and Titian to Manet and Matisse. Ultimately, however, all are subsumed by Wylie’s own voice, poking fun at the male gaze. ‘Her approach to form’, explains fellow painter David Salle, ‘is boldly idiosyncratic; her brush shoots around the whole body, and the way she paints people is like stylised Morse code: the eyes and mouths often reduced to mere dots and dashes, the hair a mass of wavy brushstrokes’ (D. Salle, ‘Going on Her Nerve’, in Rose Wylie: Which One, exh. cat. David Zwirner Gallery, New York 2021, p. 196). This assessment is vividly borne out here: through extraordinary economy of means, Wylie’s figure takes on a powerful life of her own.