ROSE WYLIE PUTS THE PICTURE FIRST AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY

At the RA, Rose Wylie reframes figuration through scale and text. Tanya Mascarenhas unpacks the 90-work exhibition.

Rose Wylie’s exhibition The Picture Comes First at the Royal Academy of Arts brings together an electric mix of 90 artworks. While Marina Abramović’s 2023 exhibition was widely framed as a historic first, the RA’s Main Galleries were first given over to a solo female artist in 1985, when Elizabeth Frink exhibited there. Wylie’s exhibition marks a different milestone: she is the first British female painter to present a solo show in the Main Galleries. Wylie, here, plays with perspective and pushes at what expanded audiences recognise as figurative painting.

Photograph courtesy of The London Art Roundup via Substack

The interplay of the pictorial and the linguistic forms the basis of Wylie’s extended body of work, creating an A–Z of words that are both direct and pointed, drawing on subjects such as film, museums, women and abstraction. Wylie draws on her rural studio life in Kent and her own inner world to produce works rooted in observation rather than recollection. The boldness of her medium — large-scale oil painting, often incorporating handwritten text into the painted surface — gives familiar forms an exaggerated clarity, reworking nostalgia through scale and the reworked perspective of familiar forms.

HAND, Drawing as Central, 2022

Wylie explicitly reminds us that words and pictures go together hand-in-hand. Works such as HAND, Drawing as Central (2022) present a triptych in which a repeated image of a hand spans three panels titled the drawing, the painting, and the oil on paper. The section titled the drawing remains central, shifting the self-portrait into a study of the hand itself. The multi-perspective structure of the triptych reflects Wylie’s engagement with film and its ability to revisit the same scene from different angles, often sequentially. Wylie’s painting Kill Bill (Film Notes) (2007) shows a single frame from Tarantino's 2007 film, but captures all of its different angles.

Kill Bill (Film Notes), 2007

The bold manner in which Wylie’s extended body of works speaks to the RA’s programming showcases her ability to move between medium and language without reliance on explanatory frameworks. Wylie’s commitment to supporting art students and young people in the arts is reflected in her artist series, Artists Promenades, at the Royal College of Art, making her an essential part of the vision to cultivate the practises of art students as part of the RA’s expanded vision.

Photography courtesy of RA

Wylie’s larger canvases open up a widened viewing field in which imagined scenes intersect with lived experience. Repeated images of planes recall her childhood during the London Blitz, later folding into cinematic references that hold similar personal weight. Works such as Bird, Lemur and Elephant (2016) appear playful, yet the recurring red elephant carries a private symbolism. Wylie’s late-career reckoning with age becomes a figurative stretch across time, linking youth and history through a sustained, evolving visual language. Overall, her practice suggests that meaning is constructed from the signs that surround us — layered, persistent, and open to revision.

 The Picture Comes First is on at the Royal Academy of Arts from 28 February - 19 April 2026. Tickets can be purchased here.

---

Tanya Mascarenhas is an aspiring art critic with an MA in Art History, navigating contemporary art, deep histories, and the occasional bewildering exhibition text. She also writes on Substack.