La Vie En Rose | Alison McWhirter
La Vie En Rose is the first solo exhibition at Morningside Gallery in Edinburgh of the work of Alison McWhirter, opening on 28 February. The exhibition brings together a series of abstract paintings alongside still lifes of roses grown in the artist’s garden and painted from life. It approaches the rose as both motif and measure — a site of translation rather than depiction.
The abstract works function as transcriptions of musical compositions and poems in which the rose is central. Rhythm, repetition, and variation are carried through texture, colour, and density, allowing sound and language to be re-formed as painted experience. Within the abstract series is a response to Tchaikovsky’s Rose Adagio: the moment in which Aurora is offered a rose and dances with each suitor in turn. This sequence of offering and exchange — poised, ceremonial, and enchanted — is bound into the movement of the painting itself. In this way, the works align with a lineage of artists — from Joan Mitchell to Cy Twombly — who have used the rose not merely as symbol, but as a vehicle for memory, sensation, and emotional charge. Notably, two of the paintings are titled after two of Shakespeare’s most well-known sonnets, each encapsulating a central concern of the exhibition: that art and love possess the capacity to defy time.
The still lifes operate in counterpoint: direct, observed, and grounded in time, weather, and sustained attention. Painted from life, they register duration and presence, anchoring the exhibition in the material conditions of looking.
The title draws on the cultural weight of La Vie En Rose — both the song first sung by Édith Piaf in 1946 and the phrase itself — in which perception is altered by intimacy and affect. Historically, the rose has carried a productive ambiguity: beauty and melancholy, intensity and transience, longing and loss. Used here, La Vie En Rose signals not sentiment, but the conditions through which experience is filtered, translated, and made visible. Ultimately, as with all of the artist’s work, the paintings return to a single, enduring subject: love. There is no more fitting choice than the rose — Alison’s favourite flower — a form through which love, time, and attention are held in tension.
