At the new Rose Wylie retrospective at the Royal Academy, beneath Burlington House’s gilded cornices and the gaze of marble busts, the artist’s anarchic canvases detonate with colour and scale. It’s a windmill of cartoonish motifs – oozing omelettes, spindly footballers, Blitz-era doodlebugs.
“We wanted to let the work shine,” the curator Katharine Stout says. “We’ve got white walls, and it’s really the energy of her colour that brings the gallery to life.”
Rose Wylie: The Picture Comes First opens tomorrow, February 28, and brings together more than 90 works spanning four decades – the largest survey of Wylie’s career yet, and the first time a woman artist has been given a full retrospective in the Academy’s main galleries. “For her to get this at her age [she was elected a Royal Academician in 2014 and is now 91], the recognition it brings is very much an acknowledgement of how important she is,” Stout says.
Wylie was born in 1934 and began painting in the 1950s, but took a 25-year hiatus to raise her family. When she returned to painting in her fifties, she turned to vast, often unprimed canvases, working in bold brushstrokes and with deliberately simplified figurations. The honing of this flat, funny, and irreverent style led to international exhibitions, representation by dealer and gallerist David Zwirner, and a recent photoshoot by Juergen Teller for Loewe’s spring/summer 2025 campaign, in which she looked painfully cool in a leather trench, clutching a green handbag.
The exhibition opens with Wylie’s memories of the Blitz, with childlike paintings of doodlebugs, swastikas and air raids. In Park Dogs & Air Raid, oversized dogs stalk Kensington Gardens while Spitfire and Messerschmitt aircraft lock in a dogfight overhead. Personal recollections like these are central to Wylie’s process, as is what she calls “transformation” and “synthesis”. She gathers up shiny film stills, newspaper photographs and observed figures like a magpie, often capturing them first in drawings before they reappear, sometimes years later, in paint. Her studio in Faversham, Kent, is a testament to this process, with its paint-splattered floors, crumbled newspapers from decades ago, and fresh copies still arriving daily at her door.
“Drawing is really at the heart of her practice, but very little is seen,” Stout says. “It’s her diary record.” A selection of these sketches is on display here – dinners, film stills, fleeting observations – forming what Stout calls “a kind of visual database” to be mined later.
In some rooms, references collide like a fever dream. Nicole Kidman appears across a grid of canvases; her backless dress is repeated against the backdrop of a Kent community centre with ancient Egyptian motifs. There is a blood-splattered scene lifted from Kill Bill. A depiction of an Arsenal versus Spurs game shares space with Lilith, the mythical figure from ancient folklore, cast here as the “first feminist”. Bees, worms, birds and triangular-faced cats roam freely, anchored by Wylie’s signature all-caps text, bringing David Shrigley to mind. Pink Skater (Will I Win Will I Win) is jubilant to see up close. A bubble-gum-pink figure launches into space, legs splayed, somewhere between Betty Boop and Little Britain’s Bubbles Devere.
Wylie has very much “forged her own style” throughout her career, Stout says. “In that sense, she can be called a rebel.”
The exhibition culminates in The Process Makes the Image, where four monumental monochrome animals are presented in saturated colours of ginger, black, blue and red. Wylie abandons the brush, dragging paint with her hands, allowing the process to assert itself over the subject.
Wylie shows no appetite for restraint and was closely involved in shaping the exhibition. “She was very clear about what she liked and didn’t like, particularly how the work was presented,” Stout says. “She is incredible in terms of her attention to detail … even her own words, just tweaking them slightly.”
Rose Wylie: The Picture Comes First runs at the Royal Academy from February 28–April 19, 2026.
