Richard Phillips

(American, born 1962)

Richard Phillips is an influential contemporary American artist known for his large-scale photorealistic paintings. Born in 1962 in Marblehead, MA, his work evokes the glossy sheen of fashion magazines, and often features close-up portraits of women found in gossip or softcore pornography magazines. “Fashion is not separate from art,” the artist has said of his source material. “It is inextricably woven into how we open ourselves to the world and articulates the exchanges of power both real and imagined.” Phillips works with a combination of oil paint and wax emulsion that uncannily imitates the surface of the printed page, resulting in images that have been described as hyper-real. He has more recently ventured into filmmaking, as evidenced with his 2011 video First Point, which he calls a “motion image” of celebrity Lindsay Lohan sunbathing and walking on the beach. Phillips’ work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, among others. He lives and works in New York, NY.