BERN.- Rose Wylie. Flick and Float presents the nonconformist and fascinating work of the British artist Rose Wylie (b. 1934). Her unique artistic practice has won her international recognition. In her large-format paintings, Wylie strips down figurative representations to their essentials. Expressive, direct and full of subversive humour, these works testify to her engagement with pop culture, film and art history. With more than fifty paintings and around a dozen drawings, between 19 July and 5 October 2025 the Zentrum Paul Klee is showing a retrospective of Wylie’s work over the last thirty years. New works have been made for the exhibition.

An unconventional career: from reading to seeing

The ninety-year-old artist lives and works in a cottage not far from London. Wylie received her artistic training at Folkestone and Dover School of Art, Goldsmiths College and the Royal College of Art in London. While raising her three children, she put her artistic career on pause, and, alongside her family life, spent a lot of time reading books. It was not until the late 1990s that seeing took over from reading again, as Wylie explained on a visit to her studio in March 2024. She started devoting herself intensively to painting again, and finally achieved international recognition with her unique work and major solo exhibitions, at Tate Britain in London and elsewhere. The Zentrum Paul Klee is devoting a major retrospective to Wylie featuring over fifty paintings and around a dozen drawings. The artist has painted eight works specially for the exhibition, which are being shown to a museum-going public for the first time in the Zentrum Paul Klee.

Inspiration from pop culture, film and art history

Wylie’s large-format works, made in the studio on the first floor of her cottage, reflect a deep understanding of pop culture, film and art history. She often works with a subversive humour that also connects her to Paul Klee. Stripped down to its essentials, and with a highly expressive lightness of touch, her artistic language references an aesthetic of ‘bad painting’ and post pop. On closer examination, Wylie’s works prove to be sharply observed and subtly polished meditations on the nature of humanity.

For Wylie, the process by which a painting is made often begins with a visual stimulus. No limits are placed on her inspiration. As indicated by the title of the exhibition, Flick and Float – the artist’s own suggestion – in her working process Wylie ‘flicks’ through a flood of images until a motif attracts her attention. The motif might be a newspaper photograph on her studio floor, a scene from a film, an everyday situation from her life, an artwork or a picture that she found while surfing the internet. What the motifs share, however, is always a special detail that does not match the norm – ‘Toujours la difference!’ is a phrase of which Wylie is particularly fond. So for example, in Singing Life Model, Wylie shows a photographic model posing with a strangely opened mouth, while Yellow Strip shows the football star Ronaldinho with his characteristically thin pony tail, which whips in time with his every movement on the pitch.

Painting from memory

Wylie usually begins by capturing her visual impressions in drawings. The drawings in the exhibition provide an insight into her creative process. Wylie does not return to the reference material, but with a few strokes reduces the picture in her memory to what she sees as essential. Speaking of her ‘Film Notes’, for example, she explains:

‘When I do film paintings, I usually work from memory […] – I do not go back to the film or to film stills to check… It’s the original visual excitement I want to work with.’ Rose Wylie, on the letter ‘F’ in the A–Z of the catalogue Rose Wylie. Flick and Float Wylie then reworks the drawing until the composition and central details are consistent. If lines have to be corrected, Wylie does not erase them, but sticks a new piece of paper over them, which sometimes makes the sketches look like collages. This process of discovery is also repeated on the big canvases in Wylie’s studio. Where necessary, Wylie scrapes the oil paint off again and adds whole new parts of canvases. This genesis provides the second part of the exhibition title, because Wylie describes the process by which her works are created as ‘floating’.

Compositional investigations with picture and writing

Wylie develops pictorial compositions that go beyond traditional perspectival representation. In her multi-panel works, for example, she juxtaposes apparently disparate images, giving rise to visual rhymes and resonances. One example is the two-part work Bagdad Cafe (Film Notes): while in the left half of the painting Wylie reworks visual stimuli from the film of the same name, in the right half she shows scenes from her everyday life – including a flower from her garden, her own mouth when eating and a coffee stain.

‘I spell often phonetically – I paint how things look and I spell how things sound.’ Rose Wylie, in an interview with Fabienne Eggelhöfer during a visit to her studio in January 2025

Wylie also includes writing as part of the composition of her works. What is central here is not so much the content of what is written as the form and arrangement of the letters on the picture surface. She places the writing deliberately to perfect her compositions. The process of writing is more important than the correct way of writing. For this reason Wylie often writes words as she hears them, spelled incorrectly. Her writing style can be experienced in the A–Z section of the exhibition catalogue. In reflections on 26 ideas, Wylie provides a deeper insight into her intellectual world.