Mock-innocence with sinister edge
Rose Wylie is a sort of Cinderella for our demographically evolving times: not a teenager in glass slippers, but an octogenarian, cuttingedge painter in pink trainers.
Having graduated from Dover School of Art in 1956, she put her career on hold to raise a family, and only really started to make an impact in the 2010s, winning awards and becoming a buzz-figure for younger women artists. Now, she’s having her first major London exhibition, aged 83. If that doesn’t have you punching the air in affirmation, you’re either irredeemably hard-hearted or too young to care.
Speaking as someone who’s certainly old enough to care, I’ve never been entirely convinced that Wylie’s quirky, defiantly messy canvases quite live up to the charm of her back story. But this show, featuring work from the Nineties to date, provides our best opportunity so far to get her measure as an artist.
A quick look is enough to establish Wylie’s signature approach: the leaping figure in the opening work, Pink Skater
(Will I Win, Will I Win), is executed in an indiscriminate mass of pink paint, red lips and startled eyes daubed on to her football of a head in what looks like seconds. In NK (Syracuse Line-up), five figures of Nicole Kidman in a bright red ball gown, inspired by a television news snippet, are so cursorily realised you’d be forgiven for thinking Wylie was looking at the TV rather than the canvas when she painted it. Your first impression is of child art blown up to a great size, while the air of slightly sinister pseudo-innocence recalls outsider art (produced by the marginal, eccentric or insane).
Yet this feeling of primitivism is calculated. Only someone with a sophisticated understanding of the way we absorb imagery could have painted Yellow Strip, in which five well-known footballers, including Thierry Henry and Wayne Rooney, are reduced to schematised likenesses, each on a separate canvas. Wylie emphasises their most recognisable characteristics rather as a medieval painter (as she herself has observed) would identify saints by their attributes. The effect is sort of funny, if you aren’t put off by a certain knowing tweeness.
The dreamlike Red Twink and Ivy and Green Twink and Ivy, with their cut-out paper dolls floating among tree trunks beside an enormous cat, brings to mind the often deliberately clumsy Neo-expressionist painting of the early Eighties (when Wylie, significantly, was studying at the Royal College of Art), typified by artists such as Georg Baselitz – though Wylie tempers their rawness with a note of Lewis Carrolllike whimsy. If that sounds a beguiling combination, she is interested less in exploring her inner feelings in the Expressionist manner than in examining the way images are constructed, drawing on art history and popular culture, recalling the early David Hockney. In Queen with Pansies she deconstructs a 16th-century portrait of Elizabeth I, plastering flowers over the canvas with wilfully cack-handed abandon. In Park Dogs & Air Raid, painted specially for the exhibition, she recalls her childhood during the Blitz in crudely rendered bombers floating over a map-like view of Hyde Park, with a paint-spattered strip representing her studio’s skirting board – a very Hockneyesque touch.
Wylie, however, lacks Hockney’s finesse and ability to assume different painterly voices. With Wylie, everything looks like Wylie in a way you’ll either find the acme of late-age artistic cool or irksomely arch.
Having veered towards the latter view in the past, I found myself warming to Wylie here – despite the fact her games with style can be funny, yet also oddly dry and uninvolving.