Rose Wylie: picky people notice…,

S.M.A.K. is pleased to present picky people notice…, the first solo exhibition in Belgium by internationally renowned British painter Rose Wylie (b. 1934).

Wylie’s vivid signature style draws upon a wide array of sources, including mythology, literature, cinema, folklore, art history, sports and celebrity culture. The artist interweaves her vast knowledge of cultural production with memories and observations distilled from her immediate surroundings. Thus enriching the visual perception with affective correlations that further resonate through the oil paint on canvas.

Wylie has been painting for over seven decades, resuming her artistic career in the 1980s, yet her work is contemporary in its timely references and their transformation. Compositions are often fragmented—an aesthetic derived as much from editing techniques as from vernacular and non-western art forms. Through her uncompromising quotation of diverse visual traditions, thereby ignoring prevailing conventions, broader reflections on cultural themes such as wealth, climate change, war and the stereotypical representation of women emerge.

Although imbued with a subversive edge, Wylie’s oeuvre also expresses an engagement with the essence of painting: composition, texture, colour, technique. Areas of impasto and heavy brushstrokes alternate with careful delineation; untreated canvas is animated by text fragments and raw daubs of paint. The complex genealogy of her paintings often materializes in preparatory drawings, providing insight into the pictorial process through which the observation of the known world leads to the modelling of a new one.

picky people notice…, includes a selection of recent and never previously exhibited paintings and drawings. The exhibition is accompanied by an extensively illustrated catalogue that includes text contributions by Tanja Boon, Philippe Van Cauteren and an interview by Rosalind Nashashibi.

The exhibition in S.M.A.K. is curated by Tanja Boon.

Rose Wylie studied at Folkestone and Dover School of Art, Kent, and at the Royal College of Art, London, where she graduated in 1981. Recent solo exhibitions include Hullo Hullo Following-on, Hangaram Art Museum, Seoul, South Korea and Aram Nuri Arts Center, Goyang, South Korea (2020-2021); where i am and was, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2020); Quack Quack, Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London (2017); Pink Girls, Yellow Curls, Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Germany (2014); Tate Britain, London (2013). She was the recipient of the Charles Wollaston Award in 2015, presented by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and became an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in 2018 for her services to art.