ROSE WYLIE

Early Years

Rose Wylie was born in 1934. She lived in India during the final years of the Raj, where her father worked in ordnance. When the Second World War broke out, the family moved to Bayswater, London, where she recalls bombing raids. She also remembers inheriting a paintbox—“My mother suggested I put it in the bath and clean it, but I resented that. I never wanted to clean the paint.” She studied art at Folkestone and Dover Art School during the 1950s but took 20 years out to raise her children before she returned to painting. She was married to the painter Roy Oxlade (1929–2014).

Rose Wylie: Artworks

Rose Wylie’s works are vast but playful, using a bold colour palette to depict film stars, famous women, footballers and royalty, among other subjects. Inspired by the mundanity of the everyday, as well as the media she sees and reads, Wylie sketches and notes her experiences. She saves these observations, which often find their way into paintings more than once—she will frequently make several iterations of an idea or motif. Working on unprimed, unstretched canvases, she often uses white with umber, sometimes painting the canvas first and at other times leaving it bare. She also adds text to her artworks. Wylie likes to display panels at the angle of interconnecting walls. “I can see one drawing with another and as you flick a page over you can see a new combination. I’ve taken that process and simply continued with it into larger pieces of canvas,” she said in 2013.

• Snow White features in Wylie’s work—she has said she still remembers going to see the Disney film in 1937. In her ironic 2018 painting, Snow White appears with a duster, taking on domestic drudgery, while the text “SOME DAY HER PRINCE WILL COME” screams out of the left hand side of the image.
• When Wylie saw images of Nicole Kidman in a backless pink dress on the Cannes red carpet in 2012, she was inspired to reproduce the actress in her work. NK (Syracuse Line-Up) (2014) depicts five Kidmans in the style of Greek sculpture, mostly seen from the back. Black Strap (Red Fly) (2014) sees Kidman depicted in a more Egyptian style, flanked by two flies, at a Kent community centre. The painting sold for £220,500 in 2021, more than three times its low estimate.
• “I do like big work,” Rose Wylie said of her 2012 panel piece Queen of Sheba & JT. “I like billboards. I like very early decorated churches where the paintings go from floor to ceiling and up arches and round the door. I’ve always thought it’s a very convenient way of using spaces in galleries and spaces anywhere.” When the Queen of Sheba panels were installed at Tate Britain in 2013, they occupied two perpendicular walls, leaving the Queen in the middle of the “bend”. She painted King Solomon as the “symbol of money”.

Rose Wylie: Select Awards

• Paul Hamlyn Prize for Visual Arts, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, London (2011)
• Senior Royal Academician, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2014)
• John Moores Painting Prize, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2014)
• Charles Wollaston Award (2015)
• Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) (2019)

Rose Wylie: Select Exhibitions

Select Solo Exhibitions

• Rose Wylie: Henri, Egypt...Bette, Bear, David Zwirner, Paris (2026)
• Rose Wylie: The Picture Comes First, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2026)
• Rose Wylie: When Found becomes Given, David Zwirner, London (2025)
• Rose Wylie: Stack and Dangle, Jari Lager Gallery, Cologne (2024)
• Rose Wylie: Close, not too close, David Zwirner, Los Angeles (2023)
• Rose Wylie: picky people notice..., Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent (2022)
• Rose Wylie, Museum Langmatt, Baden (2021)
• Rose Wylie: where i am and was, Aspen Art Museum (2020)
• Rose Wylie: Quack Quack, Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London (2017)
• Rose Wylie: Girl and Spiders, Thomas Erben, New York City (2015)
• BP Spotlight: Rose Wylie, Tate Britain, London (2013)
• Rose Wylie: Six Works on Paper and One Painting, Vous Etes Ici, Amsterdam (2011)
• Rose Wylie: Wear What You Like, Transition Gallery, London (2008)

Select Group Exhibitions

• Songs of Innocence and Experience Part II, Ingleby, Edinburgh (2026)
• Loewe Salon, Palazzo Citterio, Milan (2025)
• The Turner Contemporary Open, Turner Contemporary, Margate (2021)
• 250th Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2018)
• Rose Wylie, Tom Anholt, Billy Childish and Ryan Mosley: The Islanders, Galerie Mikael Andersen, Copenhagen (2015)
• John Moores Painting Prize 2014, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2014)
• Women to Watch—Body of Work: New Perspectives on Figure Painting, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC (2010)

Further Reading

• 2026 interview with the Guardian
• Artist profile page at David Zwirner
• 2026 interview with The Independent
• Interview with the BBC (2026)
• Rose Wylie’s studio in House and Garden

Rose Wylie FAQs

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