London-based Harare-born artist Duncan Wylie explores displacement, colonial legacies, and urban chaos through vibrant, thought-provoking paintings.
Duncan Wylie (b. 1975) is an artist based in London. Harare-born, Wylie's painting practice mines from a sensibility that is directly connected to his experience as an African artist living and working in Europe--first in Paris, where he studied and became a citizen, and latterly in London, where he now lives and works. His striking, color-drenched paintings move from the intimate to the apocalyptic, offering thoughtful and powerful observations about the modern world, its infrastructure and institutions, ideologies and identities. This publication is Wylie's first major monograph, documenting twenty years of work, from early paintings focused on urban destruction, through to the emergence of figures in his canvases, whether tightrope walkers, African dandies--"sapeurs"--or water diviners. Themes of displacement, entropy, and resistance resulting from colonial legacies recur in his works, which encompass and layer images of urban chaos with the flotsam of uprooted lives. Swimming pools, their surfaces variously reflective or opaque, are increasingly prominent, offering a critique of resource access and restriction.
Steeped in art from an early age, Wylie's work is acutely connected to the history of painting, and the relationship between British and French painting. His mother was a curator at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, which housed items from the Zimbabwean Stone Sculpture movement as well as the Courtauld Collection. Trained under artist Helen Lieros while in Zimbabwe, Wylie subsequently moved to Paris, completing his Master's degree at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 1999. He has exhibited in group surveys at numerous important institutions including the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, Musée de Grenoble, and, in 2017, the inaugural exhibition of the Louvre, Abu Dhabi, among others. He has been the subject of several solo shows, most recently with Backslash gallery in Paris.
In her foreword, Adelaide Bannerman, Curatorial Director of Tiwani Contemporary, a gallery devoted to artists from Africa and its global diaspora, introduces readers to Wylie's wide-ranging practice and the scope of the book. Juliette Singer, a champion of Wylie's work for over a decade, talks with him about the notion of time in his work, with a focus on the suspension and collision of different moments and geographies within a single image. They cover Wylie's evolution as an artist, from his breakthrough in 2005, which emerged in response to Robert Mugabe's enforced clearing of Zimbabwe's slums, to the vivid mise-en-scènes of his most recent paintings. The publication is divided into chapters introduced by Zimbabwe-based educator, critic and gallerist Valerie Kabov that trace this evolution across distinct but interconnected bodies of work. Curator and writer Marc Donnadieu provides a contextual essay, examining Wylie's painterly techniques and dynamic juxtapositions of themes.
