ROSE WYLIE

For Wylie, titles are playful labels. ‘If you like a title, that is the title,’ seems to be her way. Something similar happened with Stack and Dangle: she sought to infuse her title with a sense of sound and rhythm, even entertaining the whimsical idea of adding umlauts for an extra German flair. Plus, she aimed for something catchy and reflective of her practice. Wylie is a natural born stacker, piling up literally everything in her life: books, plates, newspapers, colour cans, visions and memories. There is a deliberate penchant for repetition and accumulation in her work, due to the vastness of her subject, but also to her method. She makes numerous preliminary drawings of the same idea, which may change slightly, and then chooses one or several for the painting. During this process, some alternatives are reconsidered or simply built on, while others are redirected, and some are left dangling. Wylie’s ideas grow organically within the picture frame, but also evolve from painting to painting and within the exhibition space. That is why her canvases are usually set up close together, creating filmstrip-like sequences, privileging connections and openness between them, rather than empty spaces and isolation.

The title also relates to a double painting from the series Life Drawing, which Wylie refers to as Stack and Dangle, because the top canvas is stapled onto the wall, unstretched, and the lower one is dangling underneath, half on the wall and half pulled out onto the gallery floor. Life Drawing are oil paintings, yet they are consciously made to look scratchy and resemble chalk drawing. For Long Brown Girl (2023), Wylie experimented ‘a new way of navigating the body.’ She was intrigued by the idea of correcting her earlier portraits of Namibian model Venantia Otto, feeling they did not fully capture the girl’s slender silhouette. She started afresh from the shoulder and then thought: ‘I’m not going to think. I will keep going until I hit the other end,’ which accounts for the portrait’s elongated, nearly abstract appeal. Ignoring accuracy and anatomical proportions is a signature touch. Her brush is only guided by the visual impact of the subject in relation to the canvas space.

Wylie definitely prefers visual excitement over beauty, which she views as both antiquated and impersonal. Her work as a whole seems to stem from those moments when she responds with an emotional investment to something that involves her intensely and stacks up in her memory. Film Notes, for example, are depictions of movie scenes that trigger her personal memories and feelings. Here again, Wylie finds working from memory a useful way to avoidliteral reproductions. Reality blurs with accumulation as memory filters and condenses, adding excitement to revealing the artwork’s journey from its original reference.

Stack and dangle also features Wylie’s glazed-ceramic sculptures and Museum Works on Paper. The relationship between the two collections is evident in her artistic vision. In a conversation with Wylie about her recent transition into producing sculptures, she claimed they hold a unique allure due to their ability to exist outdoors, resonating with her hope for art to be free and affordable for all. At the same time, she pays homage to museum buildings– the ones she has already exhibited in or aspires to exhibit in—not just for their architectural significance, but also because they symbolise spaces where art becomes accessible to the public.

Wylie has a fierce, passionate soul. She believes in the importance of preserving our planet. She loves freedom, skies, birds—everything that flies and escapes. She paints against the exclusion of marginalised cultures by incorporating their visual language in her own. There exists an implicit political undercurrent in her work, although it defies conventional classification as strictly political. This distinction arises from Wylie’s rejection of overt slogans, boundaries or ideological agendas of any kind. Well, her work is not about ideologies, it is about an unwavering devotion to the act of vision—an unbounded, universal, pre-argumentative love for everything which deserves to be seen. Her political stance is an exquisite painterly act. It is ‘the blue and yellow’ over a mountain top, the ‘shiny brown’ of black skin, a woman’s magnetic chest, the gentle roundness of a leaf.