Richard Phillips - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 14, 2009 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York; Private collection, New York

  • Exhibited


    New York, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, Richard Phillips: Law, Sex & Christian Society, May 12 – June 18, 2005

  • Literature


    M. Bracewell, Richard Phillips, London/New York, 2005, n.p. (illustrated); Friedrich Petzel Gallery and M. Fried, eds., Law, Sex & Christian Society, New York, 2006, n.p. (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Richard Phillips’ paintings evoke the pictorial style of popular culture as well as magazines from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Phillips’ strong infatuation with the protagonists of his paintings translates into strong yet elegant imagery. Focusing on contemporary issues and politics, as evidenced by the present lot, Fighter (After Rene Moncada), 2005 as well as women of the fashion and soft pornography industries, the paintings are realized in a stylized manner.
    In an interview Richard Phillips states, "In the late eighties and early nineties, appropriation in art often sought to critique society and culture by turning the images of power directly against their source, in an effort to expose the corrupt agendas of larger political entities. There was a decisive separation of the depicted subject from its form in the service of a directed message that, while devaluing the image, attempted to usher in superior ideals. At this stage painting was generally relegated to entertainment/media status, where representations of once expressive styles were seen as a conceptual social critique. The socalled painting emergency sought nothing other than the perpetuation of itself as a still-born medium trading on sympathies of initiated well-wishers. Painting as a medium was seen as an illustrative form, which sacrificed its physical and visual power to an idealistic end. Yet it is precisely the texture of these commingled relationships between times, efforts, irreconcilable differences, and hypocrisies which painting now has the power to meditate on and possess, unleashing new gestures from a position where these delusions can be seen as a control in our present social experiment, where power infused into the visual and physical reality of painting can reflect this, our alienated and fallible state of humanity," (Y. Dziewior, ed., Richard Phillips, Hamburg, 2002, n.p.).

29

Fighter (After Rene Moncada)

2005
Oil on linen.
86 1/2 x 64 in. (219.7 x 162.6 cm).

Signed and dated “Richard Phillips ‘05” on the overlap.

Estimate
$100,000 - 150,000 

Contemporary Art Part I

14 May 2009, 7pm
New York