Selected Works: Rose Wylie at Zentrum Paul Klee

This presentation showcases a selection of works from Flick and Float, Rose Wylie’s current solo exhibition at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern. Featuring works from the last thirty years as well as paintings which are on view publicly for the first time, the exhibition gives insight into the oeuvre of a truly unique artist.

One of the larger paintings in the show and a personal highlight for Wylie, Mary and Philip and Little Rose (Hall) (2025) is on view in Bern for the first time. The left-hand panel of this diptych is based on a portrait of Mary Tudor, the first queen to rule England in her own right, from 1553 to 1558, and her husband Philip II of Spain. 
 
On the right, Wylie depicts the interior of her home as well as her twenty-one-year-old granddaughter, who is also called Rose. The artist portrays "little Rose" in a long blue dress and brown coat, standing in one instance with her leg crossed over her knee—a posture Wylie herself often took as a younger woman—and sitting in another.

Wylie’s paintings are imbued with a sense of homage and reverence towards her subject matter. Her pictographic forms are augmented by words scrawled across their surfaces, the text providing viewers insight into her process in choosing certain imagery or colors.

The inscription at the bottom of Opera Singer & Teapot (2024) references Stephen Frears’s 2016 film Florence Foster Jenkins, which chronicles the efforts of the titular New York socialite who attempted to become an opera singer. Instead of Jenkins, however, Wylie pictures the profile of Lily Pons (1898–1976), a French American soprano who was popular during the artist’s childhood. The pastel colors of Pons’s chiffon scarf, rendered as speckles around her neck, are taken from popular fabric designs from the time that the singer was active. The white teapot she faces is an established fixture in Wylie’s home, and here bridges past and present.

The building depicted on the left in White Building (2022) is taken from the 1965 spaghetti western film For a Few Dollars More. Here, Wylie shows the structure from the movie as a kind of negative image of her own seventeenth-century house in Kent, England, illustrated on the right-hand side.

Beneath her house, Wylie inscribes another reference to a filmic western, Mel Brooks’s 1974 satire Blazing Saddles, specifically evoking a scene in which townspeople under attack were asked to paint replicas of buildings to deflect their adversaries. Rifles painted a deep red surround the twinned structures across these two panels, as do green dollar signs that further link to the movies.

In American Dancer (2024) the artist tackles the subject of ballet—which she learned about through the 1979 BBC program The Magic of Dance. This series, hosted by the prominent English ballerina Margot Fonteyn, traced the history of the discipline, from seventeenth-century performers to twentieth-century ballerinas across the world. Here, Wylie depicts in particular an American dancer with "workman-like" clothes, sturdy footing, and a "high-street" style. She takes art-historical cues from Russian constructivist posters by the likes of El Lissitzky that featured nonrepresentational abstract imagery; the composition of the present work is divided by triangles and rectangles filled in with darker-colored pigments, though Wylie’s diagonals are more painterly and less rigid.

Drawing is an important aspect of Wylie’s practice. Once she has selected an image or a topic, she typically makes numerous drawings on that theme as a kind of mnemonic exercise. While some of her works on paper are spontaneous responses, others contain a single image repeated endlessly, while others still are more fully realized.

“Wylie [frequently] begins with drawing, working downstairs at the dining-room table, often late into the night,” the critic Harriet Baker has observed. “She often comes across an idea for a painting in this way, making sketches after watching films, or after seeing something in a newspaper or on the street, or from memory. It’s a method that relies on chance, on her receptivity to the world around her.”

Yellow Strip (2006) is a study for Wylie’s five-panel painting of the same title showing five football players running across a pitch. Here, she punctuates the composition with quick green strokes that represent blades of grass and signify the outdoors.

Hair, Fruit and Chocolate Rabbit (Queen of Sheba and 2 Djinns) (2012) references the cultural critic Marina Warner’s book From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994), specifically the legend of the Queen of Sheba and her cloven feet. Produced as a study for a set of paintings, this mysterious composition depicts a woman in a dress with clouds of black hair. She is flanked by a figure that has magically transformed into a pineapple and a red-foil-wrapped chocolate rabbit—a nod to the artist’s daughter Bunny—who she characterizes as a couple of supernatural djinns.

Wylie’s work can be found in prominent collections worldwide, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Jerwood Foundation, United Kingdom; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Germany; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent, Belgium; Tate, United Kingdom; and Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

In February 2026, a major solo exhibition of Wylie’s work will open in the Main Galleries at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.