Aspen Art Museum

Since the early 1980s, British artist Rose Wylie has forged her own unique style of painting. Combining expressive brushwork with subjects distilled from pop-culture, art history, and her own past experiences, Wylie creates whimsical, large-scale compositions that offer sophisticated meditations on contemporary tastes and norms.

Defined by bold colors, cartoon-like figures, and an interplay between image and text, Wylie’s paintings explore such timely concerns as the power of celebrity and the representation of women in modern and contemporary visual culture. Finding inspiration in newspapers, books, advertisements, films, and digital media, Wylie fashions a version of people and events as filtered through her own memories and impressions. The result is a distinctive visual language that deftly merges social and political subjects with autobiographical elements onto monumental canvases.

Rose Wylie’s where i am and was marks the first solo museum exhibition of Wylie’s work in the United States, presenting fourteen paintings from the late 1990s to the present day, and includes a selection of preparatory drawings, concept sketches, and ephemera that illuminate Wylie’s rigorous and unorthodox artistic process.

This exhibition is curated by Max Weintraub, former Aspen Art Museum Senior Curator.

Read the first installment of our online companion publication to Rose Wylie’s where i am and was which features a conversation between the artist and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director at Serpentine Galleries, London, conducted just prior to the Serpentine presentation of Rose Wylie: Quack, Quack (November 30, 2017–February 11, 2018).

Listen to an exclusive online conversation between exhibiting artist Rose Wylie and Jennifer Higgie. Commissioned by the AAM in cooperation with the artist, Frieze, and David Zwirner, the dialogue provides further insight into Wylie’s artistic practice.

Based in London, art critic, editor, and writer Jennifer Higgie is the host and author of frieze magazine’s first podcast, Bow Down: Women in Art History.

At Home with Rose Wylie from Frieze on Vimeo.