Berna,
Its recognition has not been early, but in recent years it seems that it becomes solid. Rose Wylie was born in 1934 in the British town of Hythe, resided in her early childhood in India and returned to her country coinciding with the outbreak of World War II; For most age, since 1952, he began to train in the field of painting, first at the Folkestone and Dover art school and later in the Goldsmiths College London, where he thought about dedicating himself to teaching.
It was also there that she met her husband, the also artist Roy Oxlade, and her posterior maternity was a break in her career (and a remarkable acceleration in her readings) until, in the 1970s, she taught art classes at the Sittingbourne College of Further Education and, in 1979, she resumed her creative activity studying a master’s degree in the Royal College of Art. London; It would already be in the early nineties when the brushes resumed seriously. It would take, however, to choose to expose: Neo Rauch selected it, in an open call, to be part of the “East International” exhibition at the University of the Arts of Norwich, in 2004, and in 2010 he joined the exhibition “Women to Watch” in the National Museum of Women in the Arts of Washington; Germaine Greer then described her in The Guardianwhen he exceeded 75, as the most promising emerging artist.
His first individual in a British institution did not reach until 2013: he was offered by Tate Britain and preceded his painting award John Moores. Then they would happen their entrance to the Royal Academy of London and exhibitions in the Serpentine Gallery, Cac Málaga, the Aspen Art Museum of Colorado, the Hangaram Art Museum of Seoul and the Stedeelijk of Gante, but this summer is the Zentrum Paul Kle de Bern subversive; Also of references to cinema, pop culture and art history itself, to the same degree.
They are half a hundred paintings and a dozen drawings gathered pieces, dated in the last three decades, and eight of them have been created specifically for this occasion, because Wylie, to her nineties, continues to work in a country house near the British capital. The Swiss Zentrum has warned in his compositions ties with Klee’s irony: his is a stripped and vital style that refers to the aesthetics of the call Bad Painting and to post-pop.
Attentionly examined, their work turns out to be acute and subtly polished meditations on human nature, but it is necessary time and curiosity to reach them (the same as Wylie herself has been granted throughout her career). Their creative processes begin with a visual stimulus: “Leavea” a torrent of images until some reason attracts their attention; It can be a photograph of a newspaper on the floor of his studio, a scene of a film, a daily situation of his life, a work of art or an image that he found navigating the Internet. What these reasons, in appearance banal, share is some special detail that does not fit the norm: Toujours the Difference! She is one of this author’s slogans. For example, in Singing Life Model It shows a photographic model posing with your mouth open strangely, while Yellow Strip It presents the Ronaldinho football star with its characteristic horselary, which is mitigated to the rhythm of each of its movements in the field.
Wylie usually begins to work by expressing her visual impressions in drawings; Those collected in Bern offer a vision of their creative process. It will no longer return, however, to that reference material, but, with a few brushstrokes, reduces the image saved in its memory to the features that it considers essential. That is your method, even talking about cinema: When I paint movies, I usually work by heart (…). I do not check the film or the frames to check it … it is with the original visual emotion with what I want to work.
Next, the drawing is re -elapsed until the composition and the central details are consistent. If you have to correct lines, she does not erase them, but hits a new piece of paper on them, which sometimes makes the sketches look collages. This discovery process is repeated in the great canvases in the Wylie study: when necessary, it scrapes oil paint and adds completely new parts of fabric.
Their proposals also go beyond the traditional perspective representation. In which several panels integrate, juxtaposes seemingly disparate images, generating visual rhymes and resonances. A clear example is the composition in two parts BAGDAD CAFE: If in his left half he re -elapses visual stimuli of the Percy Adlon movie, in the right half he shows scenes of his daily life, including a flower of his garden, his own mouth when eating and a coffee stain.
Wylie also uses writing as part of the composition of her works and we will see it in Bern. The central thing in several of them is not so much the content of the written, but the form and disposition of the letters on the surface: it uses the text deliberately to perfect their creations and gives more importance to the writing process than to the correct way of writing. That is the reason that I tend to capture the words as he hears them: Evil.
Rose Wylie. “Flick and float”
Zentrum Paul Klee
Monument Im Fruchtland 3
Berna
From July 19 to October 5, 2025
