By James Brewer
At the age of 91, Rose Wylie is the first British woman painter to have a solo exhibition at the Royal Academy – appropriately showing 90 works in all.
She makes a grand splash with her mostly giant-scale, rudimentary endeavours amply filling the main galleries, eight rooms of the historic institution in Piccadilly.
Rose’s art, variously characterised as cartoonish and even childlike, is unabashedly expressive, drawing from the kaleidoscope of incidents of everyday life and icons of popular culture.
Rather than juvenile, let us say uninhibited and creative for the sake of creating. Her inner child is to the fore, and we should remember Pablo Picasso’s famous quote: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”
The Royal Academician scorns minute technicalities and theory, as her high-spirited and often playful figuration is sourced from art history, literature, cinema, celebrity personality, current affairs, premier football and her immediate surroundings.
In her paintings – or pictures, as she prefers to call them – she reduces scenarios to their essentials, adding a few explanatory texts. Simple on the surface, the subject matter seems to leap from the frame to command total attention.
Her story has its origins in World War II when she was evacuated from London to Kent where, as bombs defied ack-ack (anti-aircraft artillery), her home took a direct strike. Instead of being frightened by the Blitz, she was fascinated. Some of her paintings recorded the ‘doodlebugs’ – the deadly, buzzing V-1 missiles – in the sky. From that exposure sprang her vocation as a painter.
Beyond the bombs, her genial storylines are populated mainly by women, including Elizabeth I, Nicole Kidman, Marilyn Monroe, Serena Williams, and Snow White (Snow White dusts a room alongside the call Some Day Her Prince Will Come).
Because they highlight prominent people, newspapers and the internet grab her attention, and she is struck by how film cameras capture a scene from shifting viewpoints. Latching on to cinematic techniques, she manipulates illustrations of frames for instance from Quentin Tarantino’s blood-spattered Kill Bill (2007) and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers.
One painting – in oil, graphite, marker pen and canvas collage – of Nicole Kidman sold at auction in 2021 for £220,500. Black Strap (Red Fly) was inspired by a photo at a film premiere of the star in a striking red dress with a black strap across her back, and “accompanied” by two large flies.
In Pink Skater (Will I Win, Will I Win), 2015, the strikingly attired performer’s nervous ambition is visible in the shakiness of the image.
An oil on canvas, entitled A Handsome Couple from 2022 is inscribed A Hansome Couple and is full of detail. The couple is the Duke and Duchess of Argyll (Ian and Margaret Campbell), whose 1963 divorce case was a sensation. The Duchess had been caught on camera with another man. “It caused her to lose the divorce case. And in the end, it’s about money,” Rose comments. “Marrying for money which is often disastrous. The text says that the paparazzi are photographing them, “that people are saying ‘Oh that’s a handsome couple.’ Not that they are, they are generally thought to be.”
Rose elucidates: “It’s not because she’s the Duchess. I don’t paint kings and queens because of their status, but because I like their outfits. In this case, the three-strand pearl necklace caught my attention.”
Rose’s approach has much in common with that of her husband, Roy Oxlade, who died at the age of 85 in 2014. He was an admired painter who espoused a near-naïve return on the canvas to basics, and a prominent educator. The couple used to watch Match of the Day on television together, hence her interest in footballers. She has her favourite players, including Ronaldinho, Thierry Henry, Wayne Rooney and Peter Crouch, all of whom are seen in action on the same pitch in the five-panel Yellow Strip from 2006.
The exhibition includes Rose’s innocent, open-mouthed Bottom Teeth, Self-Portrait of 2016. The jet-black face might signify some adventure, or misadventure, at the dentist’s. An ordinary mouth gets transcendent treatment.
Painted by hand directly onto the canvas, four joyous large paintings of animals in radiant colour conclude the exhibition.
From this largest exhibition of the artist’s work to date, it is easy to see how the simplified forms echo the cartoonish aesthetic of the American painter Philip Guston (1913–1980) who Rose says was an inspiration. Beyond the shared stylistic element, there is nothing more. Guston tackled political themes including societal oppression and racism, while Rose’s cheeriness is of an accepting outlook on daily life, mustered from her scan of subjects such as her home and garden, her cat Pete, and her neighbours enjoying a casual meal or more formal dinner.
Rose studied anatomical drawing and figurative painting at Folkestone and Dover School of Art in the 1950s, and at the Royal College of Art. After a break to raise a family, in the mid-1980s she went back to painting, in an unkempt studio at her Kent home where she continues to work. Her career break came at the age of 76 when she was selected for a group show at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC. In 2014, she was elected as a Royal Academician, and in 2018 was awarded an OBE in The Queen’s Birthday Honours.
She has been in shows at Hastings, Tate Britain, Philadelphia, Norway, Germany, Copenhagen and Dublin. Everywhere, the picture comes first.
The new exhibition is curated by Katharine Stout, co-founder of The Drawing Room (a non-profit resource for contemporary drawing) and independent curator, with Tarini Malik, curator at the Royal Academy, and Colm Guo-Lin Peare, assistant curator at the RA.
Image captions. All works by Rose Wylie.
Snowwhite (3) with Duster, 2018. Oil on canvas. Private collection. © Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner. Photo: Jo Moon Price.
A Handsome Couple, 2022. Oil on canvas. Courtesy Edwin Oostmeijer. © Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner. Photo: Jack Hems.
Study for Red Twink, 2002.Graphite and coloured pencil on paper. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner. © Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner. Photo: Jack Hems.
Pink Skater (Will I Win, Will I Win), 2015. Oil on canvas. Courtesy private collection and Jari Lager Gallery. Photograph courtesy Jari Lager. Photo: Soon-Hak Kwon. © Rose Wylie.
Black Strap (Red Fly), 2012. Oil, graphite, marker and collage on canvas. Courtesy Charlotte and Philip Colbert Photograph courtesy Jari Lager. Photo: Soon-Hak Kwon. © Rose Wylie.
Bottom Teeth, Self-Portrait, 2016. Ink and collage on paper. Courtesy Sven Petersen and Holly Frean. © Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.
Gallery view: Rose Wylie’s works on a monumental scale.
Rose Wylie The Picture Comes First runs until April 19, 2026 at the Royal Academy of Arts Main Galleries, Burlington House.
