Digital print on cotton / polyester
Same artwork on two sides
20 x 20 ins / 50.8 x 50.8 cm

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.”