RICHARD PHILLIPS

Born in Marblehead, Massachusetts, USA
Lives and works in New York City, USA

For HENZEL STUDIO, Richard Phillips re-appropriated his painting Lip Biter.

Richard Phillips is known for his strikingly distinctive paintings blurring boundaries between advertising, high-life, pornography and fashion, and their ambivalent interrelations in popular culture. He has since the early 90’s furthered the appropriation of found imagery into contemporary art by embodying the critical discourse of Pop Art while creating collisions through subject matter and painting techniques.
Phillips’ work deals with the marketability of man, his wishes, ideas, actions, identity, sexuality, politics, and desires. He translates his edit of images into both drawings and paintings, making use of the iconic quality of pictures. Phillips’s female portraits have in particular attracted notice. Style of execution, delicate brush strokes, sometimes operating with glazes – and attention to specific bodily details and appliques make them hyperrealist.
His subjects, often drawn from pop culture or politics, are presented with few naturalistic details or clues to their place or setting. Staring out of their frames in blank perfection, Phillips generates his own brand of equality between the viewer and the image, predicated on a transformation of the experience from abject recognition into free philosophical speculation.
“My pictures involve a kind of wasted beauty – that’s always been a thread in my work.”

RICHARD PHILLIPS
Lip biter, 1999
Edition of 50 + 1 AP
Numbered
Accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity
Handmade art carpet, 255,000 knots / sqm
225 x 260 cm (89 x 102 ins)
Wool (New Zealand) & Silk (Bamboo or Mulberry)