Rose Wylie 

Lolita and Selffie, 2018

ROSE WYLIE Lolita and Selffie, 2018 Oil on canvas 71 5 /8 × 65 3 /8 inches (182 × 166 cm) British artist Rose Wylie (b. 1934) creates paintings and drawings that on first glance appear aesthetically simplistic, not seeming to align with any recognizable style or movement, but which, on closer inspection, are revealed to be wittily observed and subtly sophisticated meditations on the nature of visual representation itself. The layers of newspaper that line her studio floor are a frequent source of material for the artist, as she encounters images by chance while working. Drawing from such wide-ranging cultural arenas as film, fashion photography, literature, mythology, news images, sports, and individuals she meets in her day-to-day life, Wylie paints colorful and exuberant compositions that are uniquely recognizable. These works make use of an idiosyncratic visual lexicon, the directness of cartoonish figures, and a flattened perspective, while simultaneously betraying a deep awareness of art history and painterly conventions. The present work belongs to a group of works referred to by the artist as Lolita's House. Loosely referencing a house that was constructed in the 1970s in the prevalent style of the period across the street from Wylie's residence in Kent, and the neighbor's teenage daughter who would often wash their car in the driveway, these paintings and works on paper continue the artist's ongoing fascination with the shifting nature of memory and the wide-ranging external associations that become attached to it over time. In these works, Wylie, who still lives and works in the same residence she has occupied for many years, revisits her impressions of that particular time and place several decades on. Her associative reconstructions meld fact and fiction, thus drawing her lived experience into dialogue with a web of external points of reference. As the artist notes, ""The image became more potent through the multilayered exploration of how it looked; but any literary association with Nabokov's Lolita was slight, since it was only her age and frequent visibility paraded through 'dress' and 'on-view performance,' which gave her the invented name.""1 In Lolita and Selffie, Wylie imagines this character transposed to modern day—snapping a picture of herself with a phone and literally surrounded by a melee of incoherent letters from which the word ""selfie"" appears. 1 Unpublished artist's statement, March 2018.