Rose Wylie's 'Lolita's House' Exhibition at David Zwirner Explores Memory and Adolescence

Rose Wylie's exhibition 'Lolita's House' at David Zwirner in London from 20 April to 25 May 2018 featured 22 paintings and works on paper. The show centered on recurring depictions of teenage girls, inspired by Wylie's memories of a neighbor's daughter from the 1970s. These figures, with distorted features like beachball faces and jointless limbs, appear physically unstable, painted in vivid colors such as cornflower-yellow, lipstick-red, plaster-pink, and mud-brown. In works like 'Lolita and Selffie' (2018), a girl poses with a black box, her face squashed and overlapping a paper collage, set against block-letter scrawl repeating 'SELFFIE'. The title 'LOLITA' is boldly written in purple, referencing Vladimir Nabokov's character. Another piece, 'Lolita's House, Plaster Pink' (2018), uses three canvases to show variations of a girl washing a car, with annotations detailing memory processes. Wylie's paintings blend fact and fiction, conflating personal recollections with symbols like the selfie to explore adolescent self-awareness. Studio traces, including footprints and pawprints, are visible in the works, such as 'Yellow Girls, Diary Page' (2018), which collages sketches onto a date reference guide with notes referencing artist Jimmie Durham, Wylie's 2017 Serpentine Galleries exhibition, and a Tate curator's email. The exhibition highlights how memory expands and falters through these youthful figures.