The first major monograph dedicated to the work of Zimbabwe-born, London-based artist Duncan Wylie. 

Duncan Wylie is an artist born in Harare and based in London. His 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, colour-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.