Richard Phillips: Negation of the Universe - Hardcover

Steinweg, Marcus

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0847843904 ISBN 13: 9780847843909

Publisher: Rizzoli, 2014

Synopsis

The first monograph on New York–based contemporary artist Richard Phillips, best known for his large-scale paintings that are ultracool in execution and very hot in effect. Richard Phillips’s hyperrealistic oil paintings embody themes as broad as power, politics, celebrity, fashion, ideology, beauty, and sex, and pose questions about the status of painting today: Does the medium remain valid, or has it become a historical pastime? Pornography, propaganda, advertising, entertainment, fashion—Phillips incorporates material from a range of sources to confront what is at the core of contemporary image making, from the power of celebrity branding to complicity between viewer and viewed. The book’s exploitative design strategy celebrates the commercial and fashion alliances of the artist’s practice, while revealing the complex politics behind the imagery the artist chooses to paint.

About this title

About the Author:

Richard Phillips exhibits his work internationally. He is represented in the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; Tate Modern, London; and the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Marcus Steinweg is a professor at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig. Beatrix Ruf is director of the Kunsthalle Zurich.

Review:

“Love him or hate him, his entire career is laid bare in Rizzoli’s monograph of his work, Negation of the Universe. Nearly everything is on view, from his 1996 breakout show at Edward Thorp Gallery to his exhibitions from last year. The works included range from his most famous and widely-publicized paintings such as Scout (1999) to his recent experiments with sculpture and film...Negation draws attention to the ways in which his subject matter has changed with time.” –ArtCritical.com

“Richard Phillips’ hyper-realistic oil paintings embody themes as broad as power, politics, celebrity, fashion, ideology, beauty, and sex, and pose questions about the status of painting today...The book’s exploitive design strategy celebrates the commercial and fashion alliances of the artist’s practice, while revealing the complex politics behind the imagery the artist chooses to paint....the acclaimed Phillips is celebrated with a tome honoring his unique perspective on both art an fashion.” –Life + Times

“Richard Phillips paints celebrities, fashion models, porn actresses and fluffy cats, all in a deadpan, slick style that looks at once like commercial airbrush and the sternest Socialist Realism. His style is creepily commercial, while his subjects—seem perversely chosen. The New York painter is one of the more fashionable contemporary artists in part because his work eludes categorization, but this book makes clear that's because its real subject is the crisis of representational painting in a world of digital photography.” –The Star Ledger

About this edition

• Publisher: Rizzoli
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0847843904
• ISBN 13: 9780847843909
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288