Richard Phillips
dal 27/5/2002 al 29/6/2002
Segnalato da
27/5/2002
Richard Phillips
White Cube, London
A selection of new paintings by New York based artist Richard Phillips. Entitled 'Birds of Britain', the show includes five duotone portraits based on a book of photographs taken by John d Green and art directed by David Tree, which celebrates well-known British models from the 1960s.
Birds of Britain
White Cube is pleased to present a selection of new paintings by New York based artist Richard
Phillips. Entitled 'Birds of Britain', the show includes five duotone portraits based on a book of
photographs taken by John d Green and art directed by David Tree, which celebrates well-known
British models from the 1960s. Glossy hyperrealism characterises Phillips' style, which incorporates
material taken from a range of cultural sources from porn, advertising and fashion spreads from the
1960s and 70s to the pop paintings of Mel Ramos, Alex Katz, Chuck Close and Andy Warhol.
The duotone paintings in this exhibition are all executed in oil, on a highly reflective, gilded
aluminium, that testifies to the reverently handmade quality of Phillips' work. The stark use of black
and white is a departure for Phillips who previously worked mostly with a heightened technicolor
palette. In Phillips' portrait of 'Ingrid Boutling', we are presented with a close up of a girl's face, a
Twiggy look-alike, eyes cast downward at the viewer and mouth half-open implying a dominating and
yet submissive pose. In another, a diptych, a girl with wet hair is portrayed in mirror image, a
dualistic fantasy. Everything is chromatically heightened - from the glaring whites of the models
eyes to the dark, kohl black lashes, rendered in a pure, unmarked style. Phillips figuration engages
a level of abstraction where a radical lack of illusion weighs in equal terms with a fascination and
empathy.
Cropped in a sexually provocative manner, and presented without any accumulative details of place
or setting, the models become emptied out, voided. Their reflective surfaces accentuate this distant,
vacant and mask-like quality whilst simultaneously presenting them as rarefied and hieratic, set
back and untouchable. They seem representatives of a higher order, like medieval icons, empty and
available to the viewer's veneration.
Phillip's imagery seems pitted against the prudish normality of contemporary American culture.
Focusing mainly on women in close-up or in full-length provocative poses, his work mimics the trite
style of glamour photography with its readily available sexual message.
However, the stylisation of
the images, culled from a recent past which has already been romanticised in its heralding of free
love, lends the work a clear, retro quality which seems at once to place the work, as Mendes Burgi
has described it, as part of the 'thoroughly commercialised trade in sex appeal'.
In this way, his
paintings comment on the political and social nature of America where consumerist excess drives
most media related imagery and where capitalism is at its most decadent. Phillips' models have
bodies that, however realistically depicted, seem engineered purely to give pleasure. The all-over
glossy flatness of these paintings makes their subjects seem seamless and inaccessible, devoid of
any human emotion. The works are purely pictorial even though the subject matter is often physical
and visceral in the extreme.
Richard Phillips has exhibited widely in group and solo shows. He has had solo exhibitions at
Kunsthalle Zurich, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York and Max Hetzler Gallery, Berlin. In September
2002 he will exhibit at the Hamburger Kunstverein, Hamburg.
For further information please contact Alexandra Bradley or Honey Luard on 020 7930 5373.
Preview Tuesday 28th May 6-8pm
Open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am - 6pm.
White Cube
44 Duke Street, St James's, London SW1Y 6DD