Richard Phillips

The Gagosian in New York is representing the painter Richard Phillips (born 1962 in Marblehed, Mass, USA) from 14 March 2009 to 2 May 2009.
Richard Phillips’s strikingly distinctive paintings derive their tension from an unsettling blend of lurid imagery and a refined, almost academic painting style.
Phillips often incorporates material taken from a range of cultural sources, from porn, advertising and fashion spreads from the 1950s,1960s and 1970s to the pop paintings of Mel Ramos, Alex Katz and Andy Warhol, translating these into glossy, hyperrealist portraits. The result is stylised figures either in heightened colour, reminiscent of 70s Technicolor films, or in black and white, which he paints in flat, slick surfaces on canvas or aluminium.
Richard Phillips makes jpeg art — that is, imagery that looks absolutely fantastic when transferred digitally from gallery to collector, curator, critic or magazine art

director. The paintings themselves are enormous, and there is no denying the fact that images of bare-breasted babes and Nazi insignia still pack a wallop in a media-glutted world. In fact, this is partly what the work is about, the backbreaking effort to make “paintings as such” while burdened with a head full of Yale-induced Postmodern critical theory.

Hunter Drohojowska-Philp