PAF014Rose Wylie, Pale-Pink Pineapple/Bomb, 2025
Medium
Painted bronze
Date
2025
Dimensions
320 × 120 × 120 cm (126 × 47 1/4 × 47 1/4 in.)
Photo
Kim Raff
Rose Wylie describes her creative process as one of “poetic transformation”: beginning with something observed and distilling it into an image at once recognizable and newly imagined. In 2013, Wylie bought a pineapple grown in Ghana at her local market and began drawing it, captivated by its distinctive surface, proportions, and dramatic crown of leaves. As she explains, drawing begins with the “visual excitement” of encountering something that catches her attention.
Placed among towering fifty-foot pine trees that are rare at this elevation, Pale-Pink Pineapple/Bomb carries this process into three dimensions. Wylie enlarges the familiar fruit into a monumental painted bronze whose emphatic silhouette retains the immediacy of her drawings, shifting between pineapple, fantastical plant, and the explosive form suggested by its title. Against the verticality of the surrounding trees and the expanse of the mountain, an everyday object assumes an outsized presence. The work extends Wylie’s exploration of how ordinary subjects can be reimagined through drawing, scale, and material, translating the spontaneity of her pictorial language into sculpture.
AboutTheArtist
British artist Rose Wylie (b. 1934, Kent, England) works across painting, drawing, and, more recently, sculpture. Known for her large-scale compositions combining expressive brushwork, bold color, image, and text, she draws from art history, cinema, television, newspapers, advertising, popular culture, and personal memory. Drawing is central to her process, allowing recognizable subjects to be filtered through recollection and transformed into images that are at once immediate and subtly complex. Her work often departs from traditional perspective and composition, using repetition, shifting scale, and apparently disparate imagery to create unexpected visual relationships. Through this distinctive language, Wylie explores how images are seen, remembered, and remade.
Wylie’s major solo exhibitions include The Picture Comes First, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2026); Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern (2025); S.M.A.K., Ghent (2022); Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2020); Serpentine Gallery, London (2017); Turner Contemporary, Margate (2016); and Tate Britain, London (2013). She received the John Moores Painting Prize (2014), was elected a Senior Royal Academician the same year, and was awarded an OBE for services to art (2018).
