Some of her work is based on mythological figures and significant cultural moments throughout history, from the Queen of Sheba to Serena Williams’ torso after the 2018 French Open and the backless Lanvin gown that Nicole Kidman wore to the premiere of The Paperboy in 2012. “I use celebrities so people can see what I’ve done with the image, that a poetic transformation has taken place.” Often she also draws on media and news imagery – she’s as comfortable talking about Blade Runner as Spinoza.
One of the new paintings is inspired by the recent discovery of a 2,400-year-old mosaic in Turkey. But the story, Wylie says, is only an “attribute” of the painting. “The painting should be – that’s why I don’t care about the story. The story is something the painting has, but the main thing is that the painting becomes a being, it bes – not buzzy bees – it becomes an entity. You can’t add anything to it or take anything away, it has substance.” Her ambition is for the viewer to “get a feeling of quality in the painting and being, not having – it depends how you do it, not what it’s of.”
How she does it is one of the great seductive mysteries. We crunch across the studio floor, which is famously smirched with layers of old papers and paint – a beguiling, dense mass. “This is just because I work and don’t clean up because I’m doing the painting – if you clear up, you don’t do much painting. I’m not apologetic about it,” Wylie says, shrugging. We get back to the important bit. The painting inspired by the mosaic is a glorious thing – details taken from the original are blown up and transformed in Wylie’s way, such as a figure of a “nice young man. He looks like someone I’d quite like to meet.” It took her ages to get the face right, she says, and indeed the canvas is covered in clues: of paint being pushed, dragged and smoothed across the canvas. She explains she was attracted to the mosaic because “I’m a sucker for ancient – I like frescoes, mosaics, Corinthian, Greek… But I don’t want it to look ancient, I want it to look now, because I’m also a sucker for now. I want it to merge, I want it to fit in at any time – that’s what I try to do.”
