Brandbild (Sunburn)
- Richard Phillips, American, 1962
- Born: Marblehead, MA
- Work Locations: New York, NY
Richard Phillips enlarges images from marketing and celebrity culture to a monumental scale resulting in strikingly distinctive paintings. For Phillips, art, fashion, and commerce merge into huge photorealistic death masks for eighties icons such as Rob Lowe or Michael Jackson. But these images are not completely emotionally or psychologically vapid. Behind the flat, affectless, and detached surfaces of these depictions lies a hint of wistful melancholy, a nostalgic longing for a decade of decadence. Thus, glamour is tinged with the hint of decay, and the high fashion of yesterday feels painfully pastiche.
"Brandbild" depicts glossy, idealized glamour of a bygone age, when indulgence and frivolity ruled. A woman’s face encompasses the entirety of the canvas. A tawny tone bathes her face, save for her eyes and directly below her nose. Her perfectly glamorous face rendered imperfect.
Richard Phillips received his BFA in painting from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston in 1984, and his MFA in painting from Yale University School of Art in 1986. He currently lives and works in New York.
© Richard Phillips
- "Hospital"— Max Hetzler Gallery, Berlin [11/29/1997 - 01/10/1998] (curated by Sarah Morris)
- "Richard Phillips"— Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland [11/4/2000 - 12/31/2000]
- "In Limbo"— University of Denver, Victoria H. Myhren Gallery, Denver, Colorado [01/13/2005 - 03/11/2005]
- "Earth and Fire"— Denver Art Museum [06/11/2011 - 08/05/2012] (loan request originally February 2011 - February 2013)
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