Born in 1962 on the American East Coast, Richard Phillips uses the power of brands to make his art known to a wide audience. For example, he painted the Green Party politician Joschka Fischer for the Montblanc company and installed a 12-meter-high neon sculpture with the famous “Playboy” logo, the Playboy Bunny, directly on Texas Highway 90, not far from the town of Marfa (known for the Donald Judd Foundation and various other art projects such as “Prada Marfa”). However, the state of Texas classified the work as illegal advertising and had it removed – today the sculpture stands in Dallas.
The edition above was created after an oil painting that was exhibited at Mathew Gallery in New York in 2015 and subsequently at Mathew Galerie in Berlin during Gallery Weekend in 2016. The exhibition, “Conversations,” featured several works by Richard Phillips. Moving away from the hyperrealist paintings for which he is famous, the artist opts for a process of reconstitution, incorporating patterns from works by Albert Oehlen and Christopher Wool into a mise-en-scène of seemingly contradictory visual registers: In Conversation I and II, Phillips overlays photographs taken in collaboration with Playboy magazine with patterns from Albert Oehlen’s Computer Paintings series. The patterns, which originally appeared in black and white, are here interspersed with a vibrant color palette.
In Canyons I and Canyons II, the pattern painting Untitled by Christopher Wool is inverted, its negative superimposed over the print of a serape blanket. The Playboy magazine logo is placed in the lower left corner, creating a third layer on the painting’s surface. As value-free juxtapositions, the works represent the results of different paths in the production of the visual and – through the untranslatability of their elements – demonstrate a strategic engagement with the connoisseurship of contemporary painting.
In this large-scale pigment print, Phillips returns to the “Playboy” logo, but places it discreetly and small in the lower corner, even more so against a colorfully patterned background that turns out to be an adaptation of a Mexican serape rug. These rugs were once considered a symbol of Mexico’s cultural wealth; today they are a popular, yet cheap, tourist item. Seen in this light, Philipp’s work can be read as the artist’s reference to the demise of our cultural heritage.

Richard Phillips has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe. He is represented in public and private collections such as the

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Denver Museum, Colorado; the Modern Art Museum of Fort
Worth, Texas; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; UBS Paine Webber Art
Collection, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands
Netherlands; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Education
1984 BFA in Painting, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA.
1986 MFA in Painting, Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT.

Solo Exhibitions:
2016 Almine Rech Gallery, Brussels.
2015 ‘Richard Phillips: Conversations’ Matthew NYC, New York, NY.
‘Richard Phillips. Gagosian Gallery, Athens, Greece.
2014 ‘Richard Phillips. Max Hetlzer Gallery, Berlin, Germany.
‘Richard Phillips: Negation of the Universe’. Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, TX.
2012 ‘Richard Phillips: Lindsay Lohan’. The Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Queensland,
Australia.
‘Richard Phillips. Gagosian Gallery, West 24th Street, New York, NY.
2011 ‘Richard Phillips: Most Wanted.’ White Cube, London, England.
2010 ‘Museum of Prints and Drawings: Between Thought and Action’. White Cube, London, England.
2009 ‘Richard Phillips: New Museum’. Gagosian Gallery, Madison Avenue, New York, NY.
2007 ‘Richard Phillips. Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA.
2006 ‘Richard Phillips: Early Works on Paper’. Max Hetzler Gallery, Berlin, Germany.
2005 ‘Richard Phillips: Michael Fried’. White Cube, London, England.
‘Law, Sex & Christian Society. Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, NY.
2004 ‘Richard Phillips: Paintings and Drawings’. Le Consortium, Dijon, France.
2003 ‘Richard Phillips: New Paintings’. Max Hetzler Gallery, Berlin, Germany.
2001 ‘America’. Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, NY.
Max Hetzler Gallery, Berlin, Germany.
2000 Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland.
1999 Johnen & Schöttle Gallery, Cologne, Germany.
Rudiger Schöttle Gallery, Munich, Germany.
1998 Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, NY.
Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, England.
1997 ‘Richard Phillips, Paintings’. Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.
‘Richard Phillips: New Paintings’. Turner & Runyon Gallery, Dallas, TX.
1996 ‘Richard Phillips: Recent Paintings.’ Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, NY.
1995 ‘Knoxville Paintings. Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, NY.
1994 ‘White Columns’, New York, NY.