Duncan Wylie (b. 1975, Harare, Zimbabwe) is master painter, internationally renowned for his layered expressionist brushwork and deep understanding of the medium.
His complex narrative paintings have been exhibited at institutions including the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Palais de Tokyo, the Museum of Grenoble, the Modern Gallery Saarbrücken, the Pinacothèque in Luxembourg, the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, and the Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town. His works appear notably in the collections of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, Le CNAP, FMAC, FNAC, MUDAM Luxembourg, the Museum of Grenoble, and in the Pritzker, Guerlain, Colas, Perrier Jouët, et Claudine et Jean Marc Salomon foundations.
He was surrounded by art and culture from an early age, inspired by his mother, a curator at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. This lead to his training in drawing and painting with the artist Helen Lieros, which in 1992 resulted in him receiving the National Schools of Zimbabwe Prize at the age of seventeen.
Fascinated by painting, and particularly French artists and artists that had lived in France — Manet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Picasso — he settled there in 1994, in order to pursue his dream of studying at the prestigious École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, with it's history spanning 350 years. After he passed the rigorous admission procedure, worked in the ateliers of Jean-Michel Alberola and Pierre Buraglio, graduating with distinction in 1999.
"In his works, Duncan Wylie plays contrasts and oppositions. He oscillates between construction and deconstruction, abstraction and figuration, order and chaos or again between empty and full in order to show that behind a first figured world, a second awakens." Zoé Isle de Beauchaine for the Art Newspaper March 2023
Duncan Wylie acquired French nationality in 2005 and lives between London and Paris.