Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Julia Phillips: Me, Ourself & You, the next exhibition in his gallery at 526 West 22nd Street. The show will include seven new sculptures and a new series of drawings.
Phillips is known for using the body in her work, both in its fragmentary presence and its absence, to explore various dynamics in human relationships. The exhibition was created over the last year and a half, which coincided with the artist becoming pregnant, experiencing early motherhood, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. In this exhibition - after what the artist refers to as a complex personal history of pregnancies - she reflects on the process of conception, the body as a shared space, and mother-infant relationships.
Suspended from the ceiling in the front gallery, Nourisher (2022) features a ceramic cast of a chest and a face gazing downward glazed in matte orange and a deep pink. Medical tubing, a new material for Phillips, emanates from the figure’s mouth and nipples and pools below.
The Attachment series, which take their title from the psychoanalytic and biological studies of mother-infant relationships, include a variety of glazed ceramic grips and handles that suggest attachment in its multiple meanings. Stainless steel hardware, which the artist considers metaphors, include springs as a stand-in for flexibility and quick releases for autonomy.
In the Conception Drawings, created during the time of anticipated conception, the artist applies pastel and oil to vellum, leaving traces of her hands and arms visible. With titles such as Soft Tubes, Ovulation, Within Between, and Implantation, the drawings’ colors and biomorphic forms allude to a body’s imagined interior and its evolution on a cellular level.
Presented in the final gallery, Impregnator and Aborter, resembles a makeshift device. With these imaginary tools inspired by OB-GYN instruments, the artist refers to the complicated dynamics of pregnancy and bodily autonomy.
In Phillips’s work, the human body is just as frequently unseen as it is represented. “By showing the body in fragments I am hinting at a potential presence,” she has said. “Letting viewers fill in the blanks hopefully allows them to adjust the work to fit their own realities and imaginations.”
The artist will be donating a portion of the proceeds of the exhibition to local and national abortion rights funds.
Julia Phillips (b. 1985, Hamburg) lives and works in Chicago and Berlin. She has had one-person exhibitions at MoMA PS1 in New York (2018) and the Kunstverein Braunschweig (2019) and her work is currently included in “The Milk of Dreams” at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2022). In addition, her work has been included in groups exhibitions at numerous institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museu de Arte de São Paulo.
