RICHARD PHILLIPS

RICHARD PHILLIPS (1962-)

The bright, colorful oil paintings in this book show portraits of men and women by Richard Phillips. His frequently nude representations are borrowed from pornography, with animals and contemporary sculptures also featuring occasionally. They are all based on the appropriation of found images which the artist takes from magazines, the Internet or other mass media. The use of existing images stored in the cultural memory of society puts Phillips into the tradition of the so-called "Appropriation Art" of the eighties. He also emphasizes the conceptual approach of his work with unusual combinations of different motifs within a presentational context, sometimes reflecting on a larger theme, for example aspects in the life of the American president George W. Bush. In some pictures, the artist consciously reveals the technique on which his photorealistic manner of painting is based, leaving the grid necessary for the proportional transfer of the model to the canvas exposed in some places. In his work, Richard Phillips invariably makes an issue of the blurring of the borders between advertisement, lifestyle, pornography and fashion, and thus questions their ambivalent relationships.

Exhibition Schedule: Kunstverein in Hamburg September 21 - November 10, 2002

Edited by Yilmaz Dziewior, texts by Juliane Rebentisch, David Rimanelli, essays by Yilmaz Dziewior mit dem Künstler