RENÉ SCHMITT is pleased to present a collection of recent portfolios by painters Tal R (Danish, b. 1967, Tel Aviv) and Rose Wylie (British, b. 1934, Hythe) for IFPDA Print Fair 2023.

Often inspired by motifs native to the rural English countryside, including animals, insects, flowers, and everyday imagery, Rose Wylie’s work interweaves pattern, vintage advertising, and historical account in folkloric compositions. In two recent portfolios, Girl Now Meets Girl Then (2019) and Pink Girls — Yellow Curls (2014), Wylie’s characteristic crude, dry humour unfolds amid expressive and playful scenes. Through intense physicality and raw gestures of markmaking, the artist’s series of prints incorporate text and simultaneous narratives to underscore midcentury youth and symbols. Like selfportraits drawn from memory, the childlike style of the drawings recall the artist’s own coming of age. As a whole, the collection of works form a catalogue of Wylie’s singular style—intuitive, free-wheeling, and full of free-associative imagery and text.



Wylie’s work is presented alongside Copenhagen-based artist Tal R, known for his intensely colorful paintings of figures and landscapes. Combining techniques of Linocut and woodblock printing, the series on view span the artist’s ongoing interests in redacted figuration through color, form, and line. In each portfolio, the artist’s hand cuts out the image—slicing or carving into the surface of the ‘negative’—before black ink is pressed upon an either blank or gradient hued paper beneath. Both Bird in Cage (2021) and Untitled Flowers (2020) enact the effect of Marvin’s Magic Board, a popular children’s drawing toy widely available in the late 1980s, where the application of a mark making tool (often a wooden stick) upon the black surface revealed the surface below in colorful rainbows. In desaturated and pastel hues, Tal R’s depictions of birds and flowers, two elementary categories of nature, come into being in reverse as images that are layered upon instead of scraped away.



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Tal R
Bird in Cage (2021)
Linocut over acrylic painting on 300-gram rag paper
Size: 140 x 96 cm
Edition: 8 unique works (due to the work process of over-painting all works are kind of unique)
Each hand signed and numbered



In Tal R’s collection of eight works entitled Bird in Cage, various stylized representations of birds—perhaps household, perhaps wild—appear within cylindrical enclosures of containment. Closely cropped against nondescript yet domestic backdrops, at times the birds’ wings extend past the bars of the structure, arms reaching out beyond the enclosure. At others they acquiesce. A diverse range beaks, eyes, claws, and feathers elicit different emotional states of containment. Some birds appear content, others exuberant, and others yet disillusioned or longing for escape. The bird cage, whose earliest use dates to ancient Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, and China, among other cultures, was popularized in the Victorian era as a symbol for displaying wealth within the home. For the artist, the bird and the cage become one formal object—the captor and hostage are collapsed into a single plane of drawing. No single line within the drawing of Tal R’s compositions has power to dominate over the other—rather, they correspond as one and the same.



Untitled Flowers (2020)
Linocut over acrylic painting on 300-gram rag paper
Size: 140 x 96 cm
Edition: 8 unique works (due to the work process of over-painting all works are in part unique)
Each hand signed and numbered



Tal R’s bouquets are animated and vivacious. His eight select depictions of flowers are at once decorative, personified, and alive. While decidedly not belonging to landscapes or portraits, the artist’s approach to the genre of still life operates as a combination of all three major tropes in painting through their relationship to nature and the body. As stand-ins for broader subjects, the ‘stillness’ of Tal R’s still lives are interrupted by the elements beyond the flowers. In one composition, Untitled Flowers (Flower 4), a worm appears to extend out of a coffee mug as it devours the illustration of cascading apples. Here, the blossom is not featured, but rather its final form and consequence (consumption and decay). In more gourd-like and classical compositions, such as in Flower 1, Flower 3, and Flower 6, the outline of the petals arises from the opening of the vessels. In Flower 2, we see flora extending from the head of a figurative vase in the shape of a doll. Flower 5 is the only composition whose container is left barren—rather than placed within the opening of the vessel, the flora surrounds the image and acts as a wallpaper. Whether inside, in front of, or behind, the artist’s flowers appear to have a consciousness of their own.



Rose Wylie
Girl Now Meets Girl Then (2019)
22 individual works on paper
Acrylic painting and/or acrylic ink and aquarell ink painting on Pigment Ink Fine Art Prints
Hahnemühle 1584 Laid Rag Paper 300 gram
Size: each 120 x 80 cm
Edition: 10 (due to the work process all works are kind of unique)
Each hand signed and numbered



Satin painted shoes, white gloves, and the markers of debutante style adorn Rose Wylie’s crude illustrations of midcentury youth in this collection of works on paper. Air mail postage, fields of color, and scrawls of the artist’s handwriting punctuate the compositions of girls on the verge of womanhood, often costumed in organza balloon dresses, primrose bathers, cardigans, and other articles of clothing in vogue in the 1940–50s. Phrases such as “all my baby sitting money” and “birthday present, half finished” set the scene for Wiley’s figures and their conscious efforts to spend either their funds or time on appearance. Like selfportraits drawn from memory, the childlike style of the drawings recall the artist’s own coming of age.



Pink Girls — Yellow Curls (2014)
Vernis Mou etching on copper plate, acrylic, color ink over etching, collage
Zerkall laid paper 300 gram
Size: approx. 64 x 44 cm each
Series of 26 unique works each in archival portfolio
Each hand signed
Etching plates printed at Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg by Kristof Baranski
Archival portfolio made by Buchbinderei Henckus, Oldenburg



A cartoon portrait of a woman appears frequently across this series of Rose Wylie, either as part of or in observance to the narrative sequence. Drawn in a pared down, iconographic style, certain motifs reemerge—cherries, dragonflies, wire netting—as a type of language that builds from frame to frame. Certain elements of grammar and writing make their way into the compositions, most notably parentheses, which place the works in relationship to text. Reminiscent of billboards, posters, or comic strips, the predominantly black and white marks that compose these ink illustrations are cut, collaged, and converged with one another. As a whole, the collection of works form a catalogue of Wylie’s singular style—intuitive, free-wheeling, and full of free-associative imagery and text.