28 Jan 2010

UNION Gallery presents Rose Wylie

UNION is pleased to announce 'Film Notes', Rose Wylie's second solo exhibition at the gallery.

Applying a defiantly unsophisticated aesthetic, Wylie's large two-canvas paintings begin as drawings of frames recollected from films. Essentially they are remembered images, their 'accuracy' is a matter of truth to their impact on a once-viewing. Wylie's subjective response to the film makers she has chosen reveals her admiration for specific camera shots – for example the back view of the heads of Vincent and Jules filling the screen in Pulp Fiction, or the dramatic isolation of two Mennonite houses in Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light.

The biggest single collaged canvas of Penelope Cruz is less a portrait than a visual list of her wolf whistle feminine attributes.

In his catalogue essay Undomesticated: On Rose Wylie, Martin Herbert writes, 'Which brings us to Rose Wylie, for whom it's a horizontal, post-hierarchical aesthetic world: in her paintings, the look and feel of ancient art, South Park, sports or news photojournalism, Mexican commercial graphics and African lorry art, thrift-store canvases and the films of Carlos Reygadas, Pedro Almodóvar, and Quentin Tarantino jostle on the same plane. Her art makes one think that consuming all this stuff must give her the improbable energy her paintings exude. It isn't diaristic so much as it is a recording of lasting imprints, of encountered intensities good and bad: whether they be news stories about toxic paint on toys or a nation's obesity problems, or, in the Film Note series, a kind of visual sedimentation in which she paints cinematic scenes from memory. Like Bill Pullman in Lost Highway, she likes to remember things her own way, whatever the thing and whatever the way.'

Rose Wylie lives and works in Kent.

Recently included in Turner Contemporary Open, Margate; in 2010 Rose Wylie will present her work at NMWA Museum in Washington DC: she is the British finalist of the Women to Watch exhibition.