Review of the Week: Rose Wylie: The Picture Comes First at the Royal Academy

Royal Academy, London W1, until 19 April

They are big, bright, boisterous, beautiful, brimming with energy and life, colour and movement, just about ready to burst from the walls. They are single canvases, double (stacked, or side-by-side), multiple, like Muybridge frames, sometimes going around corners, hung like tapestries or film stills, a figure or a story elapsing in time. They are huge, really immense, you have to crane your neck to see some of them, move back to get the whole picture, move forward, up close, to see the wildly textured surfaces: thick globs of paint, rough edges, pencil notations, how the colours have been mixed on the canvas, the special wet-in-wet you get with oil paints, which is what the unstoppable 91-year-old artist Rose Wylie uses. 

Stretching through eight rooms of the Royal Academy’s grand upper floor, with its high vaulted ceilings and ornate flourishes, Rose Wylie: The Picture Comes First is a stunning, life-affirming exhibition that veers between past and present, the history of art and its contemporary contexts, always rendered in Wylie’s hallmark vivid style, which, much like life and its rushing flow of images, is never as simple as it seems. 

The artist, who was born in Hythe in 1934, is the first female British painter to have a solo exhibition in the main galleries of the RA, and is one of many women getting her due late in life: Wylie stopped making work for 25 years while raising her three children with the artist Roy Oxlade and only returned to do a master’s at the Royal College of Art in 1981, aged 47. She speaks of this hiatus in typically big-hearted terms: “I was never angry, because working with children is full of creativity.”

Nonetheless, practically it meant her career bloomed belatedly. And yet the sense of longevity in her images, of a life lived with complexity and empathy, is a strength. Wylie has described her work as emerging from her “vast memory bank of images”, and the subtitle of the exhibition – her largest to date in the UK – hints at the cornerstones of her practice: observation, memory, and how an image, something glimpsed, moves from life into art, transformed into another version of itself, indexical but also able to stand alone, fresh and new.

A black doodlebug in the sky, rushing through the clouds over Kent in 1944; the same type of missile at night, flying from Calais to London, bright flames licking its nose and tail. German bombers tangling high above Kensington Gardens and its Round Pond in 1940, while an array of dogs and a couple of bright yellow ducks frolic, seemingly unbothered, nearby. These paintings open the show, beginning at Wylie’s beginnings as a child living through the second world war in London and the Kentish countryside, though they were made many decades later, and as recently as 2022. The memory bank is always there to access, to dredge up images both willingly recalled and unbidden, to make us wonder how we can picture times long gone not with representational verisimilitude, but with the energy and power they hold over us as feelings, sensations, ideas, pictures that belong to us but also to the world at large. 

In Wylie’s painterly vision, perspective careens and flattens, almost cartoon-like in its dark black outlines and schematic landscapes (she says a childhood viewing of Disney’s 1937 Snow White both harrowed and inspired her with its fantastical aesthetic). Different temporalities collide, as in Lilith and Gucci Boy (2024), which combines the ancient figure of Lilith (“the first feminist,” Wylie calls her, for her rejection of subservience to Adam in the Garden of Eden) and a modern-day male model in a green Gucci suit, his face stretching beyond the frame of the image so that he appears headless (heedless?) as a contemporary pinup. In the diptych Bagdad Café (Film Notes) (2015), Brenda, the titular cafe owner in Percy Adlon’s 1987 film of the same title, stands grinning in the middle of the painting, a pink bow (flower? trumpet?) to her left, and two pages of a huge day-planner to her right, over which float some purple flowers and a huge disembodied mouth, crimson tongue emerging from between rose-red lips to lick a massive spoon.

History, that timeless memory trove, might be a recollection from infancy, but it might also be a film, a flower, a diary, Monday, Tuesday, a breakfast table, an artefact from the British Museum, a football match, the back of a celebrity’s red carpet dress, the ceiling of a famous gallery, an old advertisement for chocolate, a figure skater on the lam, poised for success. In Wylie’s work, all of these references and more, idiosyncratically preserved by her daily attention to the world around her, commingle in a timeless chronology, an accounting of a life and a mind fascinated by what images stay with us, how, and why, and what we can do with them. 

The picture may come first (Wylie collects news clippings whose visuals grab her notice) but the surface matters just as much: look past, or into, what has sometimes been referred to as a naif style and see how richly, joyously textured Wylie’s paintings are, with their thickly visible brushstrokes, heavy paint application, and alternations of bare with coloured stretches of canvas. To be able to look and notice and reimagine as Wylie does is pure pleasure, funny and fun, irreverently reverent about how much there is to see, to grab hold of and preserve, in any given moment. 

Emily LaBarge is the Nerve's art critic. A Canadian writer living in London, her essays and criticism have appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, New York Times, Artforum, mousse, Bookforum, Frieze, The Paris Review and more. Her debut book, Dog Days, was published last year by Peninsula Press.