Rose Wylie

“It should just be about the quality of the painting,” insisted the British artist Rose Wylie in a 2017 interview. “That’s what I’d like to be known for . . . not because I’m old.” Although age may contradictorily seem to be the subject of Wylie’s exhibition “Girl Now meets Girl Then,” it’s indeed more than a number; here, girlhood is instead a mnemonic scaffold, one used to rewrite the position of the self in the present. In Girl Now meets Girl Then (8/III), 2019, the artist has scribbled “in a primrose yellow bathing suit costume / 1956-55?” next to a casually drawn ingenue donning a yellow one-piece. “Frank Usher frock, black silk / Oxford 1957. All my babysitting money” reads another recollection in Girl Now meets Girl Then (12/III), as a debutante leans askew, unencumbered by contextualizing background.

Wylie’s immediate aesthetics—the directness of composition, illustrative approach to hand, and diaristic text—might evoke a strict memoiristic mission, with the artist gathering the sartorial and perhaps affective highlights of her childhood and adolescence. Not all works are captioned, but variations on the same self-portrait proliferate across the gallery walls. Yet small details such as arbitrarily broken contours and sundry postage marks signal that the transmission across space and time has not been so continuous. Wylie first sketched each of her Girls, sometimes doctoring them with collagic insertions and graphic revisions before scanning them as digital files. Expanding each image to large-format dimensions, Wylie then colored each print individually with acrylic paint or ink. Her depictions are thus mostly autographic but not entirely autobiographical. You don’t exactly come into yourself with the passing of time, it seems. You just find new ways to try to keep track.