Rose Wylie

She was born in Hythe^[4] in Kent on 14 October 1934.^[5] Wylie studied at the Folkestone and Dover School of Art^[6] from 1952 to 1956, taking a break from painting, to raise her family, she later graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA, in 1981.^[7]

Wylie described as a rebel artist, lives and works alone, sometimes to 3am, in her Kent cottage, producing extremely large paintings on unstretched, unprimed canvas, in her signature loose, spontaneous style.ĺ^[8][1][7] She paints from memory, usually taking her imagery from mass media.^[3]

Wylie was one of the seven finalists for the 2009 Threadneedle Prize,^[9] and one of the winners of the 2011 Paul Hamlyn Foundation Prize for Visual Arts.^[10]

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..^[11] In 2012, she had a retrospective at Jerwood Gallery, Hastings,^[12] followed in 2013 by an exhibition at Tate Britain, London that featured recent works.^[13]

In September 2014, she won the John Moores Painting Prize.^[14][15] In December 2014 she was elected a Royal Academician.^[1] In June 2015 she won the Charles Wollaston Award for "most distinguished work" in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.^[16]

She has been invited to meet and talk with students in the significant artists series ‘Artists Promenades’ at the Royal College of Art and given talks on her work at The Slade, Goldsmiths, Wimbledon College of Art, The Royal Academy Schools, The Royal Drawing School, John Moores Liverpool, the ICA and Tate Britain. Wylie has work in private and public collections including Tate Britain, the Arts Council Collection, Jerwood Foundation, Hammer Collection, and York City Art Gallery. 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.^[17] Previously represented by Union Gallery, she signed up to the David Zwirner Gallery in 2017.^[18]

In February 2026, Wylie became the first British female artist to occupy all of the Royal Academy of Arts main galleries, in her exibition, The Picture Comes First which concludes on the 19 April 2026.^[8]

Her husband was Roy Oxlade, also a painter. Wylie initially gave up painting to raise their family.^[14]

Lack of money was not a limitation to her; she and her family had strategies to overcome this, offering informal painting classes at their house and turning the garden into a place for students to camp. In a short film, Wylie says that friends of her children asked why she was always dressed in the same clothes; her reply was “as a radical non consumer, I prefer dealing with what I have.”^[19]

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.^[20]

• 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.^[21]
• 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.