Alvaro Barrington and Rose Wylie Artist Dialogue: A Complete Invention
In 2017 Alvaro Barrington (b.1983) contributed a text titled ‘A long short rapid brushstroke’ to the catalogue for the solo exhibition Quack Quack by Rose Wylie (b.1934) at the Serpentine Galleries, London. In it, he noted that ‘there is a certain intelligence that comes with making a painting’ – one that concerns ‘how your eye creates an image’, in ‘upending your visual expectations so that the experience of the work continues to be fresh, continues to exist in your imagination, long after it has been experienced’. Wylie’s way of working, he continued, leaves him ‘restless, wanting to move around’, his eyes becoming ‘active’ when looking but also reflecting on her work. Four years later, Barrington and Wylie’s exchange was continued when their work was exhibited side by side in the group exhibition Mixing It Up: Painting Today at the Hayward Gallery, London. The pairing was apt not only for Barrington’s recurrent use of the rose motif – most notably in the exhibited painting A Rose for a Rose (2021), which he dedicated to Wylie – but also for both artists’ approach to image-making and their shared tendency to draw from and rework everyday visual culture.
In his practice, Barrington collages together a wide range of references, from 1990s hip-hop to Henri Matisse, interweaving them with autobiographical material. Adopting an expanded approach to painting, he incorporates such diverse materials as concrete, textiles, clothing, glass, steel, milk crates, snare drums and brooms. Wylie’s work is similarly replete with references – to cinema, celebrities, literature and ancient civilisations – which are staged alongside her own memories and experiences. As Jennifer Higgie observes, in her canvases ‘the dead and living commingle like guests at a cosmic cocktail party’, where ‘kings and queens […] proceed to rub shoulders with footballers and movie stars, all of whom appear at once immortal and all too human’.
This conversation between the two artists took place in Wylie’s studio in September 2025, during preparations for The Picture Comes First at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (RA; 28th February–19th April 2026), the largest presentation of her work to date. Discussing Wylie’s canvases in progress, the pair also reflected on processes of erasure and addition, nervous lines, putting words into painting and the importance of true invention.
