Richard Phillips is one of today’s most intriguing figurative painters whose fascination with portraiture, identity, the machinery of celebrity, and our endless devotion to the mere surface of things all combine in highly charged and multi-layered representations of the human face and form. Most often portraying women, Phillips’ works are a hybrid of the flattering and the quizzical, and draw
Richard Phillips is one of today’s most intriguing figurative painters whose fascination with portraiture, identity, the machinery of celebrity, and our endless devotion to the mere surface of things all combine in highly charged and multi-layered representations of the human face and form. Most often portraying women, Phillips’ works are a hybrid of the flattering and the quizzical, and draw upon and diverge from countless depictions of women throughout history. Phillips’ works often use the conventions of fashion photography to raise questions about representation, gender, and sexuality. In Grace, Phillips’ source image is a black-and-white photo of model Grace Hartzel. Phillips has not merely transcribed the photo into painting form. Through careful cropping and his smoothed out painting application, the image gains a more cinematic, emotional timbre that is missing from the fashion photo. In addition to an important 1997 exhibition at the Turner and Runyon Gallery, Dallas, he has exhibited his work in many important individual and group exhibitions in the US and Europe, and his work is in the collections of The Modern, Fort Worth; MoMA, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; SFMoMA; Tate Modern, London; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; and the Whitney Museum, New York, among others. Phillips was the featured artist at the 2012 TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art.
