Rose Wylie

Rose Wylie (born 14 October 1934) is a British painter. She is an artist known for creating large paintings on unprimed canvas.

Life and work Wylie was born in Hythe in Kent She studied at the Folkestone and Dover School of Art from 1952 to 1956. She stopped painting to raise her children, channeling her artistic energies, she said, into “soups, jam, clothes, curtains, and Christmas cards.” . In 1981 she graduated with an MA from the Royal College of Art at 47. .

Wylie only began to receive recognition for her distinctive oversized paintings, made in her signature loose, spontaneous style, later in life, in her 70s. She was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Jerwood Gallery in 2012 , then Tate Britain the following year and the Serpentine in 2017. Previously represented by Union Gallery, she signed with David Zwirner Gallery in 2017.

Wylie creates her oversized paintings on unstretched, unprimed canvas with “stubby brushes, like scrubbing brushes so I can push things around”. She also uses her fingers or applies paint straight from the tube. She often sticks, tacks and glues scraps onto the canvas to give the painting texture, with smudges and drips left apparent. "I don’t mind imperfection at all," she once said in an interview, "only I don’t call it imperfection—I call it “wearing out” or “it’s got a stain on it” or “it’s falling apart.”

Her work is inspired by her daily life and sources such as movies, comic books, nature, news, sports, and celebrity stories. She has painted scenes from Quentin Tarantino films and football matches; still lifes of her kitchen burners; portraits of her daughter applying mascara and herself eating a cookie. She often returns to the female figure, with Marilyn Monroe, Nicole Kidman, Queen Elizabeth I, and Serena Williams as recurring characters. Her paintings often combines high and low culture.

Words and phrases frequently appear in her paintings. Text often guides the viewer, offering hints about the stories, films, or personal memories behind the imagery. They are also treated as shapes and compositional elements.

In 2010 Wylie was the only non-American artist represented in the Women to Watch exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C..

In 2016 Rose Wylie: Pink Girls, Yellow curls was held at the Städtische Galerie, Wolfsburg, and she has also had a solo show at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin.

In February 2026, Wylie became the first British female artist to occupy all of the Royal Academy of Arts main galleries with her exhibition, The Picture Comes First.

In 1955 when Wylie was just 21 years old, studying art in Folkestone and Dover she was painted by Anthony Devas for the Aero girl ad campaign. She describes herself as being a “rebellious art student” at the time, adding that her look was “more Brigitte Bardot than Mills & Boon cover.” It is apt that the painting is labelled, not with the true identity of the sitter, but with the fictitious advertiser’s title, Alice. As a young woman, Wylie regularly modelled for the artist John Ward and it was whilst his friend Devas was staying with him, that she sat for this Aero commission. She knew that the portrait would appear in Rowntree's Aero adverts and by the time she was at Goldsmiths College in 1956, it had already been published in the Daily Express, News of the World and People Illustrated.

She continues to live and work in the Kent home she once shared with Roy Oxlade.

Solo Exhibitions Rose Wylie. The Picture Comes First, 28 February - 19 April 2026, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK. Rose Wylie: When Found becomes Given, 3 April - 23 May, 2025, David Zwirner, London, UK. Car and Girls, 20 January - 19 February 2022, David Zwirner, London, UK. Rose Wylie: where i am and was, 1 July - 1 November 2020, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen Colorado, USA.

Collections Wylie has work in private and public collections including Tate Britain, the Arts Council Collection, Jerwood Foundation, Hammer Collection, and York City Art Gallery.

Awards

Wylie was one of the seven finalists for the 2009 Threadneedle Prize,

In 2011 she was one of the winners of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Prize for Visual Arts.

In September 2014, she won the John Moores Painting Prize.

In December 2014 she was elected a Royal Academician.