Rose Wylie: Which One - Hardcover

by Rose Wylie (Author), Barry Schwabsky (Author), Judith Bernstein (Author)

This comprehensive catalog of the work of the beloved artist Rose Wylie over the last five years, highlighting her expansive oeuvre of painting and drawing

"Wylie fearlessly tackles the thorniest topics head-on, committing her thoughts and questions about politics, religion, fame, love, history, money and nature to canvas." -- Charlotte Brook, Harper's Bazaar

Inspired by film, pop culture, and the history of fashion as she experienced personally, Wylie harnesses a union of high and low culture with a bold technique of mark making. Her unique practice of material overlay and erasure creates fantastic compositions. Creating conceptual tensions between formal and informal aesthetics, Wylie employs the visual elements of text as formal details in her paintings.

With a beautiful swiss binding, this monograph compiles the work of four exhibitions at David Zwirner offering a full breadth of Wylie's most recent work to date. Giving insight and compassion to Wylie's feminist and rebellious impulses, Judith Bernstein writes an accompanying text on how she relates to Wylie's ambitious and playful energy. With a foreword by Nicholas Serota, this publication also features new essays by Barry Schwabsky and David Salle and an enlightening interview between the artist and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Author Biography

British artist Rose Wylie (b. 1934) paints uniquely recognizable, colorful, and exuberant compositions that at first glance are instantly accessible, not seeming to align with any discernible style or movement, but on closer inspection are revealed to be wittily observed and subtly sophisticated meditations on the nature of visual representation itself. As curator Clarrie Wallis notes, "[Wylie's] large pictures are painted in a kind of visual shorthand that is direct and legible. The ability to elicit a range of responses is made possible precisely because of her reduction of form to an essential vibrancy that incorporates, via the very physicality of her medium, not just what the artist sees but an accompanying multitude of thoughts, feelings, and memories. Wylie's work is a sophisticated transmutation, or sifting of perceptual experience, carrying as it does a wealth of affective and allusive resonances, into the painted form."

Barry Schwabsky is an art critic for The Nation and coeditor of international reviews for Artforum. He has published several books of criticism, among them The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting (2019), Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism (2019), and The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (2016). His fourth collection of poetry is Feelings of And (2022). He has taught at Goldsmiths College, Yale University, and the Maryland Institute College of Art, among others, and lives in New York.

Since her MFA from Yale in 1967, Judith Bernstein has developed a reputation as one of the most unwaveringly provocative artists of her generation. For over 50 years, her work has been an autobiographical exploration of the connection between the political and the sexual. Steadfast in her cultural, political and social critique throughout her career, Bernstein surged into art world prominence in the early 1970s with her monumental anti-war and Feminist charcoal drawings of anthropomorphic phallic screws. In 2016 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work is included in collections internationally.

Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, Senior Advisor at LUMA Arles, and Senior Artistic Advisor at The Shed in New York. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show World Soup (The Kitchen Show) in 1991, he has curated more than 350 exhibitions, his recent shows include IT'S URGENT at LUMA Arles (2019-2021), and Enzo Mari at Triennale Milano (2020). Obrist's recent publications include Ways of Curating (2015), The Age of Earthquakes (2015), Lives of the Artists, Lives of Architects (2015), Mondialité (2017), Somewhere Totally Else (2018) The Athens Dialogues (2018), An Exhibition Always Hides Another Exhibition (2019), Maria Lassnig: Letters (2020), Entrevistas Brasileiras: Volume 2 (2020), The Extreme Self: Age of You (2021), and 140 Ideas for Planet Earth (2021).

David Salle is an American painter and essayist. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at museums and galleries worldwide, and his paintings are in the collections of major museums both here and abroad. He was recently the subject of a career survey exhibition at the Brant Foundation, Greenwich CT. Salle is also a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His collection of essays HOW TO SEE: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art, was published by W.W. Norton in 2016.

Nicholas Serota was Director of Tate from 1988 to 2017 and of the Whitechapel Art Gallery from 1976 to 1988. He is currently Chair of Arts Council England and a member of the Board of the BBC as well as being a trustee of foundations that care for the work and legacies of the artists Rebecca Horn, Donald Judd and Cy Twombly.