Figure Head

Rose Wylie (1934 - )

Oil on canvas with pencil

2017

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  • About the work
    Location
    Country: France
    City: Paris
    Place: British Embassy
    Figure Head shows a woman poised like a mermaid at the helm of a ship. The work’s title is emblazoned beneath her feet in Rose Wylie’s characteristic lettering. Yellow, pink and green dabs of paint stand out against the unprimed canvas in-between the letters. These dabs are where the artist has wiped her brushes, acting as a record of her process.

    Figure Head is part of a larger series of works Wylie began in 2015 at the invitation of Ben Borthwick, Artistic Director of Plymouth Art Center, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the famous Mayflower ship setting sail from Plymouth for America in 1620.

    A selection of Wylie’s notes on the painting are reproduced below:

    Sailing boats and ‘women-in-front’ (figure heads here) seem a current position – and carved women offer different possibilities than from real.
    The first (of these two “figure head” paintings) was picked up from an earlier Nicole Kidman painting I’d made, (Black Gown,NK), but stretched into impossible body proportion and connection, dangling small legs off the edge of a very elongated small green skirt. She appears visionary, stuck-in flicked-out yellow, a hopeful Joan of Arc for the sailors behind.
    The question was whether to paint-on outlines, etc. – but the answer was to leave it alone, …

    Wylie is best known for creating colourful, large-scale, figurative paintings that are intelligent, funny, and quietly political. These are usually made from memory and draw on a wide range of cultural references from history, fashion and cinema, to mythology, sport and literature. The thread linking these fields is her interest in how images evolve and accumulate meaning – becoming familiar, iconic and part of the narrative of popular culture and wider history.

  • About the artist
    Rose Wylie studied at Folkestone and Dover School of Art, and at the Royal College of Art. Wylie represented Great Britain in Women To Watch, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C (2010). Her first retrospective exhibition was held at the Jerwood Gallery, Hastings (2012), and was followed by her BP Spotlight exhibition at Tate Britain (2013), which led to museum shows in Philadelphia; Tonsberg, Norway; Wolfsberg, Germany; Tal R’s Project Space, Copenhagen; and the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin. Solo exhibitions in the UK include Quack Quack, Serpentine Sackler Gallery (2017); History Painting at Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange, Plymouth (2018); and the Royal Academy’s 250th Anniversary flags along Bond Street, London (2018). In 2011, she was given the Paul Hamlyn Award and in 2014, she won the John Moores Painting Prize. In 2018, she was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List.
  • Explore
    Places
    Subjects
    figurehead, woman
    Materials & Techniques
    canvas, oil, graphite pencil, oil painting
  • Details
    Artist
    Rose Wylie (1934 - )
    Title
    Figure Head
    Date
    2017
    Medium
    Oil on canvas with pencil
    Dimensions
    height: 183.5 cm, width: 168.5 cm, depth: 3.5 cm
    Acquisition
    Purchased from Choi&Lager Gallery, September 2018
    Inscription
    verso (canvas) upper right: Rosewylie ; additional pencil notations verso on stretchers
    Provenance
    Choi&Lager Gallery, Cologne, Germany; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 2018
    GAC number
    18776