Peter Phillips, 21.05.1939, Birmingham, UK – 23.06.2025, Birmingham, UK



Mosaikbild 5 x 5, Supergirl, 1975,



Oil on canvas

Signed and dated on the verso of the canvas as well as on the stretcher and titled on the stretcher

200 x 200 x 3 cm,

Provenance: Waddington Galleries, London (1976); bought there in Art Basel, private collection Othmar Triebold, Switzerland; Private collection Pierre Marti, Switzerland; Heirs of the former.





Since 1975, however, Peter Phillips has been prepared to ‘manufacture’ his

own ‘found’ material, choosing the actual objects he wants to use and having them

photographed professionally under carefully controlled conditions with a large format

camera. This gives him not only greater flexibility in the choice of image and of its

particular configurations, but also a much finer degree of detail. Whether the image

be of a lobster, a parrot or a snake, however, every motif has been translated into two

dimensions before the painting is begun. Nothing is painted directly from life. No

fundamental change, in other words, has taken place in Phillips’s manner of working.

The first paintings based on this kind of high-definition photograph, Mosaikbild

5x 5/Supergirl! 1975 and Mosaikbild/Displacements 1976, were occasioned by personal considerations. “My wife Claude said to me once, “You’re. always painting women, why don’t you ever paint me?” So being a nice guy I said, “Okay, why not?” She looks okay, she looks as good as all the pin-up girls. I took her to a photographer’s studio and photographed her with a professional pin-up photographer, I got a load of photographs, then I chose again in the same way the ones that appealed to me, and put them in the painting. So the process, in fact, is not different. It was just a question of a personal thing with Claude, but there’s no great difference. Instead of a found object, she became, in a sense, an archetype for all of these things. They’re images for all images.





Marco Livingstone, Peter Phillips,

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 1982:





The Pop paintings produced by Peter Phillips during the 1960s, large in scale, brilliant

in colour and polished in finish, today seem to encapsulate that era, and they

have lost none of their formal or emotive power over the years. Bold and aggressive inconception, even the earliest paintings, executed when the artist was barely in his

twenties as a student at the Royal College of Art. startle today with their directness of

impact.

Ata time when many artists were flirting with modern technology, Phillips immersed

himself wholly and without apology in the machine aesthetic. His range of images —

whether of automobiles, machine parts, predatory animals, pin-ups or scientific diagrams

~ was drawn exclusively from readily-available printed sources, mass-produced,

cheap and familiar to anyone living in this society. Phillips’s techniques and compositional

methods, likewise, were appropriated from commercial art and from industry,

not just in his use of the airbrush for an anonymous perfection of finish but in his

habit of recycling images from one painting to another as if they were the interchangeable

parts of a modern machine produced by assembly-line methods.

Over the past two years a radical change has taken place in the appearance of

Phillips’s paintings. The ‘Pop’ label sits uneasily with them. Big enough for the artist

to ‘move around in’ but less over- powering in scale than the canvases of a decade ago,

these are colour fields, painted with conventional brushes rather than with an airbrush,

against which are disposed isolated fragments of dimly recognizable but enigmatic

images such as animal skins. The dazzling colours of Phillips’s previous work

have given way, for the time being at least, to more subtle and sombre hues, The surface,

though still tightly controlled, no longer aspires to a machine-like perfection

and anonymity, but instead bears traces of the artist’s hand in building up the paint

to the required density.

The new paintings may look very different from the earlier work, but in fundamental

terms of attitude and approach nothing has changed. The collage principle is still

at work in the intuitive Juxtapositions of images from magazines and similar readymade

material. Technique continues to be a major preoccupation, with surprising mixtures

of materials normally thought to be incompatible and with three-dimensional

additions which extend the pictorial illusions into real space.

The new paintings provide eloquent proof of the lateral, rather than linear, thinking

which lies at the root of Phillips’s work. The outward form of the paintings has been

drastically rephrased by a change in the nature of the imagery and in the tools and materials

employed, but the content, if defined in terms of operating principles, remains

basically unaltered.

“There’s a series of many different overlapping preoccupations that keep emerging and

disappearing, and then might re-emerge under some other disguise concedes Phillips.

‘In one sense |’m constantly reaffirming everything I’ve done, but at the same time

constantly destroying, ending that and starting a new thing. But for me that’s the only

way it carries on being interesting.”

This attitude of wilful contradiction is the source of a number of conflicts both conscious

and unconscious, within Phillips’s work. From the beginning he has brought

together elements generally considered to be mutually exclusive, not just in the way

of technique but in terms of stylistic affiliation. The machine aesthetic merges with

colour held painting, Pop crosses over into Conceptual Art as advertising imagery

gives way to the artist’s own market research, and geometric abstraction is injected

with the intuitive juxtapositions of images characteristic of Surrealism. It is not a question

of deliberately seeking to combine opposites, but rather of adapting to his own

ends whatever he finds of interest.

Phillips has drawn from a great range of twentieth century are; Cubist and Dadaist

collage and photomontage, Surrealism, Léger and Purism, Kandinsky, Abstract

Expressionism, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg have all left their mark. He has

also studied pre- Renaissance painting and, more recently, has explored the techniques

of Dutch still life painters such as Jan Davidse de Heem (1606-84). In Phillips’s view,

however, it would be an unnecessary conceit or intrusion to make direct reference to

the work of other artists in his own paintings. Instead his preference is for ordinary

images of the kind one comes across every day, painted with recourse to tools and materials

— household gloss paint. car paint. photographs and the airbrush — familiar

from outside of the realm of fine art. Often choosing deliberately vulgar imagery,

Phillips nevertheless commands an extreme refinement of technique, even though his

method of painting may have been adapted from an equally unrespectable source in

commercial art,

Phillips maintains that anything can be material for a picture, yet he has demonstrated

on many occasions a preference for a particular range of obsessive images.

Magazines, books, and decals have provided a convenient range of images already

processed into two dimensions, the result being that there has been a preponderance

of advertising and mass media imagery: games, motorcycles, cars, machinery, pin-ups.

‘To view the paintings purely as a materialistic revelling in consumer products, however,

would be to ignore the emotional dimension provided by the juxtaposition of

images, bold colours and geometric elements, just as seeing the images exclusively in

terms of their two dimensions would be to miss the consistent involvement with illusions

and with complex spatial systems.

There is no doubt that, until recently, Phillips’s paintings have been aggressively direct.

and that much of their impact has emanated from the positively-stated images,

rendered as precisely as possible so as to provide an immediate point of recognition

and contact with the viewer. In terms of meaning, however, the paintings are disconcertingly enigmatic and open-ended. Rather than direct the viewer’s attention towards a thematic resolution, Phillips expects the viewer to take responsibility for making sense of it for himself.



‘A person who looks at a painting should be able to create himself, he should have the

freedom to interpret, This is why a painting for me must be complicated, with a lot

of different references, handlings of paint, points of view and illusionistic changes.

You can read it in a million ways. It just depends on how interested the particular person

is, the mistake is to look at it in a particular way and say “That’s that.” It’s not. |

would prefer chat it remain in chat state of tension. | would prefer that there is a game

which can constantly be played with the painting which is never resolved. You can’t

win, you can’t lose. It’s better that way, because then the painting is self-generative.

Each individual can interpret it in his own way.“

Phillips is not cumulating mystery for its own sake when he refuses to pin down the

meaning of his paintings, nor is he taking the easy way out when he says that a variety

of interpretations are possible but that no one reading is necessarily the ‘correct”

one. His urge to involve the viewer as a collaborator and active participant rules out

the possibility of imposing specific meanings, These visual games are an invitation to

share in the artist’s emotional life and experience of the world, with an emphasis on

the sharing. Since no manual activity is involved, the game is ready to be played at any

time; all that is needed to set it into motion are one’s own emotions and intellect.

Games are meant to be fun, and there certainly is a great deal of pleasure afforded by

Phillips’s work in terms of colour, form, surface and imagery. lt soon becomes clear.

however, chat it is not all light-hearted and easy-going. Even the fun-fair, beneath its

surface of glitter and excitement, has its monsters, its distorting mirrors, its confusion

of noise and movement. There is a sense of unease, too, in Phillips’s paintings — sometimes

obliquely stated in images of sexual frustration or impending violence — reaching

at times an almost hysterical pitch in the frenzied cluster of sharply-defined images

against stridently-coloured backgrounds.

It might be objected that I have already overstepped the bounds of neutrality by reading

particular emotional values into the paintings. The issue, however, is precisely that

the paintings cannot be appreciated as coolly-calculated celebrations of popular culture

or merely as pleasing or dynamic formal arrangements. Some measure of interpretation

is essential on the part of every viewer in order to release the emotional and

mental potential of each picture, but it does not matter whether one interpretation accords

with another, for there is no single ‘solution, and therefore no winner and no

loser. Assaulted and numbed by the constant How of images every day of our lives, is

it not cause enough for celebration that paintings can still spur us to feel and to think?

The sense of menace which infiltrates this celebration is, perhaps, only the other side

of the same coin: a despair on the part of the artist that the people he wants to reach

may not be interested in art in any case. One is enticed towards the paintings by various

means: largeness of scale. brilliance of colour, familiarity of imagery, beauty of

surface and virtuosity of technique. Having been seduced into looking at the painting,

the problem of meaning is then thrown back to us, leading us, paradoxically, to

a state of confusion within the context of a very assertive statement. Once more we

are returned to the state of tension and to the contradictions which form the very substance

of Phillips’s work.

“There is no such thing as nonsense,’ maintains Phillips, who regards painting as an

unconscious activity, ‘One “dreams” into a painting, Not in the sense of Dali, but this

inexplicable feeling that one has, and a sudden, spur of the moment decision, are very

important. | really dislike a painting when it is logical. It loses its spontaneity, and this

is the only way | can retain any spontaneity, when | have a very logical way of working.

Conceiving of his paintings as visual equivalents for emotions, it is essential to Phillips

that decisions be made impulsively but that they be executed very methodically. ‘It’s

very related to Surrealist painting, the early beginnings of dissimilar elements together.

This fascinates me. You put two things together, and it becomes something else. If

you put them together right, it generates a totally new experience that can be very

powerful.’

A perpetual need to surprise himself thus underlies the formulation of each painting

as well as Phillips’s development as a whole. ‘Te becomes boring when you know what

you’re doing. That’s why, even though is always the same, there are abrupt stylistic

changes in my work,’

Arbitrariness, in Phillips’s view, is not to be mocked or feared, bur accepted as an essential

part of the creative process. In the discussion of the artist’s development which

follows, some of these intuitive leaps will be singled out for examination in the hope

that they may provide a few clues as to the sort of intuitive responses expected in return

from the sympathetic spectator.

Binge 1960, painted by Phillips some months after his arrival at the Royal College of

Art in the autumn of 1959, is one of his earliest surviving paintings and the first evidence

of the direction his work was to take over the following decade. Basically

heraldic in its imagery and apparently spontaneous in execution, it nevertheless represents

a synthesis of the conflicting artistic interests and experiences which had preoccupied

him since his early teenage years. The artist’s initial technical training, his

study of pre-Renaissance painting, and his encounter with Abstract Expressionism

and with the work of Jasper Johns all play their part.

Born in 1939, Phillips entered art school at the age of thirteen, spending two years

(1953-55) at the Moseley Road Secondary School of Art in Birmingham, a school of

applied arts where he was taught a number of disciplines including painting and decorating,

sign-writing, heraldry, silversmithing, graphic design, architectural illustration

and technical draughtsmanship. Phillips acknowledges that these craft skills,

learned at an impressionable age, have all left their mark. as has the general emphasis

on technical discipline and on perception,

‘l remember certain techniques that impressed me at the time, and certain ways of

thinking, attitudes, who knows, they have some sort of subconscious effect on you

later.’

Significant, too, was the fact that Art History was not even mentioned, and that at

first Phillips had no specific intentions of becoming a painter. Romantic visions of the

artist’s role or great ambitions to remake the Old Masters thus were, and have remained,

completely alien concepts to him, In their place was a more purely physical

pleasure in the visual stimuli in the world around him, and a desire to be of his own

time.

Only alter his move to the Birmingham College of Arts and Crafts in 1955, in the second

year of his Intermediate Course, did Phillips decide to become a painter, It was

during this period that he exhibited his first paintings, Social Realist ‘political paintings’

with titles such as The Dispute and Early Shift. “Birmingham is a factory town,

and in those days a very working class orientated area. | just used to go out and draw

factories and strikers. | did quite a lot of those sort of street things with rather grey

people, and painted the billboards and all chat sort of thing.’ Phillips was soon to reject

this particular form of figuration and especially the clement of overt social comment,

but the habit of taking his subjects from the immediate environment is one

which has stayed with him.



While still at Birmingham, Phillips became interested in fourteenth and fifteenth

century Italian painting, his curiosity whetted in part of the Pre-Raphaelite collection

at the City Art Gallery. An opportunity to study at first hand the work of painters

such as Cimabue, Giotto, Uccello and Bellini came with the travelling scholarship

awarded to him by the College of Arts and Crafts on his departure in the summer of

1959. His journey took him first to Paris and then to Florence, Venice and other

Italian cities; he bypassed Rome, presumably because its treasures of High

Renaissance and Baroque painting held less fascination for him.

‘] did particularly like early Italian painting, pre-Renaissance Sienese and Florentine

painting, where they split up the surface of the painting. It wasn’t an illusionistic

space. it wasn’t this hole in the wall | was fascinated by the way they would divide up

a panel, They would paint a figure and then they would have five or six little scenes

going on, and to me that was very beautiful, and still is, as is much manuscript illustration,

| like it very much, because it deals with another sort of space. Asa rule | tend

not to like the High Renaissances o much; the paint | like, but this illusionistic space

as a totality never interested me so much.

“The early painters weren’t interested in representing a scene, but as far as | can recollect,

when an artist was painting the Virgin, that thing was the Virgin. These little

extra things were stories that were symbolically complementing the Virgin of whatever

it was. It was very interesting, because what they did was the object, whereas later

on they were representing something, Even though it was very complex again in its

metaphor, we don’t particularly understand it, because unless you’re a scholar we have

no symbolic education any more. It possibly worked on other levels then, but for us

it’s just an illusionistic semi-narrative illustration, with its only interest in the various

types of paint and compositional organization. But this type of unity didn’t interest

me enough.’

Prior to his departure for ltaly, Phillips had become acquainted for the first time with

Abstract Expressionism at the Tate Gallery exhibition of The New American Painting

held in February-March 1959. It was a particular revelation for an artist who recalls

asking as late as 1956, ‘Do Americans actually paint?’ He remembers being impressed

most by Willem de Kooning and Clyfford Stull, and to a lesser degree by Philip

Guston and James Brooks, though Barnett Newman he found ‘too radical.’

Contact with Abstract Expressionism provided Phillips with the impetus to move onto

a larger scale when he took up his place at the Royal College of Art in 1959. Among

his fellow students, only Derek Boshier was working on a similar scale, although other

artists revealed related interests: David Hockney at the time was working in an idiom

inspired by Alan Davie, Allen Jones was studying the work of pioneers of abstraction

such as Wassily Kandinsky and Robert Delaunay, and R.B. Kitaj — an

American himself, and seven years older — was adapting de Kooning and Robert

Rauschenberg to personal ends. On the whole the other students were painting still-

lifes and portraits in a rather traditional idiom, using a small scale and rather muddy

colour.



Outside the Royal College, ‘Abstract Expressionism was all the rage’, as Phillips recalls.

Abstract painters of a slightly older generation, such as Bernard Cohen Robyn

Denny and John Hoyland (then finishing his studies at the Royal Academy Schools),

were responding in their own way to the boldness and large scale of American painting.

Phillips knew Hoyland slightly at the time but had little contact with the others;

any formal similarities between Phillips’s games-board paintings of 1960 onwards and

the work of these hard-edge painters can be traced to common interests rather than

to any direct influence from the older British painters. A more direct factor was the

friendly spirit of competition between Phillips and the other young painters with

whom he was sharing a flat at $8 Holland Road, Kensington, all of them students at

the Royal Academy.

‘At College you were learning “advanced figure painting” or whatever — just student

exercises — and at home one was trying to make one’s own cultural contribution. The

College was still geared to figure painting, but it was never explained why, or what

one should get out of it. It was just a discipline that one had to do. So obviously one

revolted against that when one was home and did exactly the opposite. | can’t imagine

that anyone knew what he was doing. | certainly didn’t. One was just trying to

make paintings that looked like other people’s paintings. | remember Michael Upton

always had sort of Rauschenbergs lying around, and he was trying to knock off Larry

Rivers type paintings and doing it pretty well. David Willetts, who also lived in the

flat, was doing Jackson Pollock type paintings. [t was a whole mixture, The small

room was full of these people, it was very exciting in a way, and everybody was trying

to do their thing. De Kooning was the biggest influence at that time because he was

at least more Europeanized than the other Americans, so you had perhaps a little

more contact with it. Everybody was trying to imitate de Kooning. You had your

book of de Kooning open and you were painting your pictures.’

The only one of Phillips’s paintings in this vein which survives, Big Orange, bears closer

comparison with the work of other British artists such as Gillian Ayres than with

the paintings of the Americans. Thinly painted in orange and green, with much of the

white canvas showing through, 1 consists of curvilinear forms suggestive of plant

growth or flowers, loosely brushed with veils of colour.

Phillips’s efforts to paint in this manner were short-lived. A turning-point, he recalls,

was having one of his paintings, Afar Tenderness, laughed ac by the art critic Lawrence

Alloway during the setting up of the Young Contemporaries exhibition in March

1960, Phillips had met Alloway while still a student at Birmingham and respected his

opinion, knowing of his position in the art world though unaware of his previous involvement

with the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Alloway’s spontaneous reaction came as a salutary shock, and Phillips decided to rid

his work of eclecticism and of characteristics that were foreign to his own natural abilities,

“I realized before that | wasn’t an expressionistic type of artist in this gestural

sense. So I did exactly the opposite and tried to do that which [ already had some familiarity

with, and that was controlled painting.”

Binge 1960 marks Phillips’s return to the principles of ‘controlled’ painting which he

had learned in Birmingham, at the same time displaying a tentative move into the

funfair imagery which he was soon to make his stock-in-trade. The colour remains

muted, orange, red and yellow vying with black, brown and white; the artist’s touch

is still of central importance in the thin but sensuously-brushed surface; and there

continue to be echoes of de Kooning’s paintings of the 19405 in the ambiguous ovoid

forms in the centre.

What is new here is the heraldic simplicity of the imagery in the top row — a Fleur-de-lis.

a target. and a club of clover shape — and its compartmentalization within rigidly-

defined areas. This method of encasing subsidiary images as a means of establishing

a formal relationship with the central visual event is one of a series of personal responses to the characteristics of the early Italian altarpieces which Phillips had been

studying. The tall vertical format itself can be related to this source, as can the organization

around a central axis, with purposeful deviations from absolute symmetry.

Different spatial systems co-exist, the suggestions of a shallow interior space in the

central area counteracted by the flat and frontal boxed-in images above. Consistency

of meaning’ in a representational sense is disregarded — with enigmatic images placed

arbitrarily against coloured backgrounds and a blandly-stated row of colour samples

– since abrupt changes can be neutralized by the relative homogeneity of surface.

Edges are sharply-defined, the outlines drawn in pencil and then filled in with paint,

“By this time | was interested in quite a lot of things from Mas Ernst, Léger, and then

to see the Americans, Johns and Rauschenberg, in some magazines. | had a girlfriend

who went to New York. who lived there and who used to get a lot of stuff sent to me,

and obviously | was incredibly impressed by Johns’ and Rauschenberg’s ways of

working.

Johns’ paintings had not yet been shown in Britain, and even in reproduction Phillips

maintains that he was aware only of the targets. Even this scanty evidence, however,

provided vivid clues to a new approach to picture-making. Most of the early criticism

of Johns’s work concentrated on his choice and use of subject matter, the way in which

a target. for instance, acted as ‘some simple visual symbol’, satisfying in a matter-of fact

way Modernist demands for fatness and anti-illusionism and encouraging the basic

act of looking. Crucial, too, was the face that the paintings not only represented

ordinary objects but took the actual form of those objects. a neat solution to the

dilemma of incorporating specific figurative references while preserving the status of

the painted canvas independent of its representational function, Having already

sensed a similar identification of subject with painted object in early Italian art,

Phillips was quick to seize on the implications of Johns’ work. ‘T was interested in

making a painting that didn’t necessarily refer directly to a subject. | was trying to

make a picture that was self-contained. This was the thing at that time, One talked

about making “objects” as opposed to “paintings”, because painting at that time was

still associated in a sense with a narration of some sort, particularly in the art schools.’

Johnsian themes, implicit in Binge in the choice of the target and in the sequential array

of images in the upper register — a device used by the American in works such as

the famous Jarger with Plaster Casts of 1955 – emerge in a more structured form in

Phillips’s Purple Flag, painted over the course of three months in the summer of 1960.

Phillips recalls that he would not have chosen the Union Jack as an image if he had

been aware of Johns’s paintings of the American flag, readily admitting, however, that

the subject occurred to him as an equivalent type of image to the target.

Rather than setting a single motif against a fat ground or simply presenting it on its

own, as Johns had done, Phillips Nag, drained of its normal colour, occupies half the

surface, with the other half filled with a range of smaller motifs: a row of targets, an

American football player painted from a photograph, a grid of coloured squares containing

an arbitrary sequence of numbers, These juxtapositions establish an alternative

time scale, a sequence of actions within a static context, a suggestion emphasized

by the presence of the figure with outstretched arm. As in Italian altarpieces, in which

panels establish a narrative complement to the starkly formalized central image,

movement is introduced within a rigidly-controlled format. This device soon became

a recurring feature of Phillips’s work, for example in the invented comic-strip se-

quence of Wal! Machine 1961 of in the striptease freeze-shots of For Men Only —

Starring MM and BB 1961, in which each image is framed by a panel of polished

wood.

‘Purple Flag took me a long time to paint, constantly changing it and honestly probably

not really knowing what | was doing. All | do know is that it was the first serious

attempt at controlling the format of the painting, flattening out the surface and

still leaving areas of illusion in, It was another way of painting and another use of imagery

that, to my knowledge at that time, was not acceptable as a way of making

paintings. From three months concentrated work on this every evening, with a lot of

little drawings and thinking on the side, | probably learned more than from five years

at an art school.”

For the first time in Phillips’s work, a number of contrasting techniques are incorporated

within a single painting, each change of pace contained within a clearly-demarcated

subdivision, The flag itself is painted in a mixture of oil paint with wax.

Other areas are painted simply in oil, sometimes polished to change the appearance

of the surface, at other times imprinted with newspaper as a means of speeding up the

drying time and of creating a matt texture. Fragments of paper are allowed to remain

on the surface, a device suggested by the work of Kitaj, whose sketchy notational style

of the time was the source also for the treatment of the figure. The cancellation mark

over the figure, a random decision which was quickly wo become an obsessive image

in Phillips’s work, provides yet another deliberate break in the logic. “I was trying to

prove to myself that, within my capabilities, there are many different ways of approaching

something which, when it’s within a relatively rigid and controlled format,

could work together.”

One Five Times! Sharp Shooter 1960, painted immediately after Purple Flag, carries further

not only the amusement arcade imagery but also the principles of conscious disruption

and of intuitive juxtapositions of images from unrelated sources: a row of targets

with actual holes punched in them, a grid of selected numbers, a diagrammatic

representation of a sleeve pistol, and what appears to be a hare, half-obscured by a

cancellation mark, muttering the curious phrase, ‘JUST THE THING FOR TAXIDERMISTS

AND BATMEN’. By this stage Phillips had begun to seek out additional

visual information to use in his paintings. Diagrams he found particularly appealing;

what they represented was more or less incidental, since their interest lay in

the fact that they were found images of inexplicable fascination in themselves. The

precision of draughtsmanship required in mechanical or scientific diagrams, placed at

the service of objects which are often obscure to the uninitiated, serves to strengthen

their enigmatic status. Phillips welcomes this ambivalence between familiarity and

impenetrability not just as a means of keeping the paintings alive, but as an equivalent

for the way one goes about one’s daily business, sometimes feeling to control, at

other times failing to comprehend the significance of objects and events with which

one is confronted.



‘There are certain periods where paintings tie up more than at others, but | don’t

think it is very important if a painting does tie up with a theme. This one obviously

is to do more with a funfair and shooting, but it’s peculiar enough to obscure it a little

bit. enough to make it interesting. [fit was just a comment on rifle ranges or something,

it would be rather dull, One just had a peculiar feeling and cried to get this into

the painting, using imagery that responded to that feeling. Certain types of fairground

activity somehow came in with this type of feeling, rather like Orson Welles

would often use a hall of mirrors of something in his movies. It’s a place of fun, but

somehow it has an undercurrent of menace the whole time. People did respond to

this. The early paintings are not always what they seem to be; this undercurrent is always

there,”

Phillips’s early paintings were worked out entirely on the canvas; it was not until late

in 1963 that he began to make preparatory drawings. Taking as his starting point a

strong formal structure, Phillips would then seek to ‘fill this structure with the correct

feeling and image and balance’, an intuitive process made all the more difficult by his

insistence that the result appear as assertive and confident as possible. This ‘juggling

of dissimilar elements until it feels right’ could be an arduous process, but the effort

was not to be visible. The unpretentious imagery afforded by games, pinball machines,

jukeboxes and the like was a convenient means of establishing the desired neutrality,

though the process of building up the painting, as the artist revealed in a catalogue

statement published in 1962, was every bit as subjective as that of the Abstract

Expressionists: ‘Some pictorial organization is essential, though the result is never preconceived

but develops during the painting process. Content is important, as is the

complexity of image and idea, relationships, format and sources. Each painting in its

break-down and build-up becomes a personal experience. | like the finished object to

exist, first and foremost as a FACT, as well as an identification of myself in an environment,

and as a contribution to that environment.’

The conflicting demands of deliberation and spontaneity occasioned a great amount

of reworking in Phillips’s early paintings, and accounts for the face chat in 1961 he

completed only five pictures, each one, however, a surprisingly authoritative statement

for an artist aged twenty-two and still a student: Wall Machine, Entertainment

Machine, Burlesque Baby Throw, War Game End For Men Only — Starring MM and BB.

Varied as they may be in terms of imagery – incorporating, as they do, monsters, cartoon

characters, movie stars, pin-ups and soldiers from the American Civil War — they

are united through their common reference to games, both in terms of structure and

in the way that they engage the spectators attention.

The central structure of Wal! Machine, for instance, is provided by the solitaire game,

into which the artist has inserted tiny images of monsters upside down. The formal

simplicity of the game format supplied a heraldic image which gave Phillips the freedom

to do whatever he wanted within it. just as the regular sequence of frames below

allowed him the luxury of creating his own comic strip fantasy.

‘| was very interested then in what I called “game formats.” A game is also that type

of thing, a big image subdivided into little pictures, and you would play this, so that

the thing became a sort of visual game where more or less anything could be acceptable.

Again this was from a highly emotional point of view. I had a lot of comic strips,

but | wasn’t self-conscious that this was anything particularly important. To me nobody

had done it, so | thought I’d just stick it in, paint a comic strip. At the time there

was nothing for me to go on. There was certainly no Roy Lichtenstein around that |

knew of, or anybody else who was doing that. | never really continued it, it was just

something that | did; it was a throwaway.’



Comic strip images feature again in War/Game, though copied in this instance from

American magazines. As Phillips himself admits, this is one of the few paintings he

has done which is in context with a particular theme, that of the American Civil War,

the centenary of which was being observed at that time. ‘lt seemed very strange to me

at the time that somebody could actually celebrate a war, particularly a very brutal war

where brother was shooting brother.’ The flippancy with which the subject was being

treated by the Americans struck him as rather sinister; in recognition of this he incorporated

sick jokes into the speech bubbles emanating from the figures.

If War/Game stands alone in its satirical intentions, it nevertheless relates closety to

Phillips’s other paintings of the time in terms of imagery and of format. The gun as a

sign of irrational violence and power, already used in One Five Times! Sharp Shooter,

reappears in the assemblage of diagrams in the lower-right of Entertainment Machine,

although the contraption in the latter incorporates a pistol and a diagram of bullet

sizes, the image as a totality is invented and, it goes without saying, inoperable, The

artist remains neutral about the question of violence, Moralistic sincerity does not enter

into it, When Goya painted The Shootings of May 3rd 1808 — a painting chosen by

Phillips as the subject of the transcription required by the College – was he simply

making a straightforward political statement, or was he not also using the drama of

that violence to his own pictorial ends?

An ever wider range of techniques is incorporated into Phillips’s work during this period.

In War/Game, for instance, black gloss household paint — first used in Wall

Machine — is smoothed down with a pumice stone and played against areas of matt

paint, waxed paint, and polished paint, The uppermost row of images is painted on

separate canvases, onto which have been glued panels of polished wood. All these diverse

elements, pieced together in a craftsman like way — one befitting the son of a carpenter

— are housed finally, within a deep box frame. The actual process of construction

thus becomes another means of composing a picture, another system to be added

to the ever-growing range of possibilities. :

Similar constructive devices are used in For Men Only — Starring MM and BB, notably

in the lower row of images encased in wooden frames. The idea for this, Phillips readily

admits, relates to the paradelles of the pre-Renaissance altarpieces he so admired,

‘but it also comes from specific feeling: something Victorian, ancient, used, and menacing

at the same time, but then with imagery that was up-to-date and underground.

How conscious that was | don’t remember,’ By this time, however it is clear that

Phillips had developed sufficient self-confidence to adapt formal characteristics of the

art of Cimabue and Giotto to a contemporary context, using the imagery, materials,

blaring colours and frantic emotions of his own time. Among the elements which he

has drawn from the pre-Renaissance are the tall vertical format organized around a

central axis, the underlying symmetry subtly broken into: the use of reversals and interplay

of positive with negative forms: the notion of serialized narrative, expressed in

the form of stark repeats: a preference for an insistent frontality and for a compartmentalization

of images: and an emphasis on the physical presence of the picture by

means of its actual construction. These are all devices to which Phillips was to continue

to refer directly at least as late as Gravy for the Navy and Four Stars of 1963, in

both of which symmetrical images of seductive women framed by star shapes are presented

like the haloed attendant angels to an early Madonna,



The imagery of For Men Only is drawn from a number of separate sources. The starting

point was the bold games-board shape in the upper half, invented by Phillips as a

suitably formal container. The collaged heads of Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte

Bardot, the two great pinups of the time, were magazine photographs that he happened

to have ‘lying around,’ rather than images which he had consciously sought

out, The stars, chosen here as another standard motif equivalent to the flag or target,

have in this initial instance a punning function, although they soon became a

favoured personal element that was used in a variety of ways. The image of the hare

was partly invented and partly suggested by a Victorian game — a subject about which

Phillips had informed himself through books – of “The Tortoise and the Hare.” The

apparently random letters contained in the circles within the hare form the message

‘She’s a doll’ followed by the name of the stripper, painted from photographs, represented

in the sequence of images below. The newspaper image imprinted in the yellow

image around the hare, taken from the pop music paper Melody Maker and bearing

the clear headline “ELVIS FOR BRITAIN’ was selected, Phillips maintains, not

for its particular message but merely because it was a journal which he used to read

regularly and which reflected his interests.

It would be possible to construct various contradictory explanations of the narrative

implied by the juxtapositions of images in the painting, So many actions and written

messages are incorporated into the picture that one feels impelled to make sense of it

in thematic terms. It must be repeated, however, that there is no single resolution, no

magic key to unlocking its meaning. In order to experience the painting fully, each

spectator must work out a logic that satisfies him or herself,

The figure with outstretched arm in For Men Only — a not so distant relation of the

similarly-engaged football player in Purple Flag — functions as a sort of stand-in for

the spectator, encouraging one to approach the painting and to take part in its games.

Just as the artist has had to make a series of decisions in producing the picture, so one

is offered constant choice, There are different surfaces and different ways of applying

paint. There are a number of ways of creating images: they can be taken ready-made

in the form of collage, invented, transcribed from photographs or diagrams, or transferred

as direct imprints into the paint from newspapers. There are different ways,

too, of getting words onto the surface, such as newspaper collage, newspaper imprints

and Letterset: in Wiel Machine, by contrast, the words are written by hand. The possibilities

are endless, limited only by the artist’s sensibility and intuition.

Each of Phillips’s paintings at this time operates according to its own set of rules.

Burlesque/Baby Throw incorporates pin-up photographs collaged onto the surface and

varnished, along with four wooden rings which, in theory, can be thrown at the canvas.

Not without irony, Phillips here takes to its literal conclusion the notion of spectator

participation implicit in Johns’s targets and the combination of real objects with

painted surface in Rauschenberg’s ‘combines’ Entertainment Machine, by contrast, is

wilfully obscure in its function, combining as it does a strange mechanical apparatus,

a piano keyboard, a cancellation mark and the head of the Amazing Colossal Man. A

collaged panel in the upper-right, bearing the words ‘Modern Schools,’ appears to

take the form of an Abstract Expressionist painting by Clifford Stull, although Phillips

denies that he was consciously making an impudent gesture towards ‘modern schools’

of painting,

Phillips maintains that the very disparateness of the imagery he was using was a motivating

force in his decision to work on a large scale. ‘] could never work on a small

scale, | never felt satisfied. | need room to move around in, and to get the compositional

elements to rotate I’ve got to have a certain amount of space in between.’

The assertiveness of Phillips’s paintings from 1961 onwards can perhaps be accounted

for also by the recognition he was already beginning to receive, as well as by his situation

at the Royal College. Phillips was president of the organizing committee of the

“Young Contemporaries’ exhibition held in February 1961, with Allen Jones, recently expelled from the College for his excessive independence, as secretary. On the advice

of Lawrence Alloway, their paintings and those of Royal College colleagues

such as Kitaj, Hockney, Boshier and Caulfield were rehung as a group shortly before

the opening of the exhibition so as to make a greater impact. The attention they

received in the press confirmed their sense of group identity, particularly as they

were under great pressure from the College staff to conform to a more traditional

way of working.



When Allen Jones was expelled at the end of his first year in the summer of 1960,

Phillips was given a provisional pass and told to reform or else leave at the end of three

months, As a matter of expediency, he painted ‘total English mannerist art school’

nudes and still-lives in grey. These pleased the staff and he was allowed to stay. At this

point he brought in the paintings reflecting his real interests, which he had been working

on simultaneously at home.

This caused, of course, serious friction with the staff and led to Phillips’s decision to

transfer in his third year to the Television School, while continuing to devote most of

his time to painting. The isolation from the staff in the end proved salutary in establishing

an independent way of working, particularly as the students themselves provided

their own standards and mutual support. | think the basic level of competition

is quite important in a very small area between people, Phillips later recalled.

“Fighting a system, and knowing that you weren’t alone, strengthened us.’

The discovery that older artists were working along similar lines was a further source

of encouragement. Peter Blake, whom he knew well by the end of 1961, if not earlier,

came closest to his way of thinking, Richard Hamilton he recalls meeting in about

1962, but Hamilton was based in Newcastle then and his paintings were not really

seen until the time of his first one-man show in 1964, Phillips knew nothing, moreover,

of the exhibition called This is Tomorrow in which Hamilton took part in 1956,

as he was aged only seventeen at the time and was living in Birmingham. Hamilton’s

involvement with the specifics of contemporary iconography, moreover, is at variance

with the more intuitive approach favoured by Phillips. A closer spirit is the Scottish

sculptor and printmaker Eduardo Paolozzi, who in Phillips’s own words is a ‘collage

assemblist’ like himself. Phillips did not meet Paolozzi, however, until 1964, and

Paolozzi’s Bunk collages of the late 1940s, often cited as early works of Pop, were not

in fact publicly exhibited until they were acquired by the Tate Gallery in 1971. It

would be wrong, likewise, to consider the discussions of the Independent Group in

the mid-1950s as a spur to Phillips, since he knew nothing of their activities.

Questions of precedence are beside the point.



Phillips readily accepts the Pop label, if it is taken in terms of attitude, style and technique

as well as of image. In a three-way interview with Allen Jones and Richard

Smith published in 1965, Phillips agreed that he was probably ‘more orthodox’ than

the others in his use of Pop imagery. „I consciously make a selection from ordinary

things which I like and then use them as a contemporary iconography. But still.” he

was quick to explain, ‘my aim is not to make comments or develop a story about the

objects | use. | try to transform them in order to make a painting and | use them simply

as images.”

In Phillips’s own estimation his greatest mentor was not a contemporary artist but an

earlier twentieth century painter, Fernand Léger. His interest in Léger began, he recalls,

while he was still at Birmingham mainly through reproductions in books, and

one of the first art books he purchased was the monograph on the artist by Robert L.

Delevoy published in 1962. In his essays on “The Machine Aesthetic, which Phillips

did not read until some years later, Léger praised the beauty of machine- made objects,

a beauty which he stressed was independent of what they represented. Feeling, not intellect,

he insisted, was the realm of painting.



The pointers provided by Léger’s work were particularly useful to Phillips because of

their flexibility. Foremost among these is the ‘law of contrasts’ — between, for example,

real and painted elements, fragments and wholes, flat and volumetric images, and

unrelated objects suspended in an arbitrary space — which Léger considered ‘the eternal

means of producing the impression of activity, of life.” Associating himself with

technology, Léger sought to create “beautiful objects’ with the aid of ‘mechanical elements,

rejecting in the process what he considered to be the overly obvious individualism

of the autographic mark.

“Léger did exactly what I do. He goes into the street and sees a photograph of the

Mona Lisa and thinks, “That’s exactly what | want with a bunch of keys.” That’s a totally

pure gut reaction. This is where | feel a certain affinity. He would go to the industrial

fairs and find the things beautiful, and | agree totally with him. But I’m not

obsessed with technology in the way that he was. because I don’t share his dream of

industrialization. In fact totally the contrary, but they still fascinate me as elements

for a painting.”

Phillips’s interest in Léger led him in to the work of Americans such as Stuart

Davis, Charies Demuth and Charles Scheeler, and linked up also with the work of the

Dadaists Kurt Schwitters, whose collages consisted of humble found objects. and

Francis Picabia, whose diagrammatic portraits of machines find echoes in works by

Phillips such as Mororpsycho/Tiger 1961/62. Equally important to Phillips as a source

of ideas was Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s pioneering book Vision in Motion, originally published

in 1947, which made a strong case for the harnessing of technology to art as a

means of expressing feelings in a manner appropriate to our age.

Technology initially entered Phillips’s work in the form of imagery, and it was only at

a later stage that he became interested in employing machines as working tools. The

double motorcycle engine in Motorpsycho/Tiger, for instance. was drawn by hand

from a diagram in a magazine. The engine’s role, in a sense, is as a substitute for the

figure. While the cyclist is represented as a helmeted head with little trace of personality,

the anatomy of the machine is lovingly detailed, treated on one side as a kind of

skeleton drawing and on the other as its exterior of metallic skin.

The sense of depersonalization in a highly industrialized society, hinted at in the subconscious

selection and placement of imagery, is implicit also in the direct use of

ready-made material in this and other paintings of 1962, The tiger head on the helmet

is a self-adhesive decal purchased at a motorcycle shop: the larger tiger head enclosed

in the green heart is a hand-painted facsimile of the same image. Similar exchanges

occur in other paintings. /Tribal | x 4 1962 incorporates four decals of a

speeding motorcycle and a schematically-painted representation of an Indian head.

While this head ts an enlargement of a decal which had been used in MotorpsycholAce

1962, the motorcycle has a later life in MULT ImotorPLICATION 1963, where it is

used both as a painted repeat and as a wooden element in relief, Similarly, the decal

which supplied the model for the leaping tiger in Motorpsycho/Club Tiger 1962 is

stuck on the middle of the painted image itself.



Since decals are an easily-accessible source of visual material, their use in the paintings

in one respect is merely a matter of convenience, an economical way of producing

an image. They exist as two-dimensional facts, and consequently can be taken exactly

as they are or merely enlarged to the required size. Phillips makes a particular

point of not changing the image so as not to ‘add’ himself to it, jealously maintaining

a neutral stance. On the other hand, they are not chosen completely arbitrarily.

I was more into the physical activities of the

city, the seedy side, than the refined side. It had a certain dynamic that I felt at home

with. The irony, however, of using something so anonymous as a personal sign was

not lost to him. ‘It’s an individualization of that machine object that somebody purchases.

and then individualizes with non-remarkable images that are already manufactured

in mass-production for individualization. So you have this contradiction in

terms.

Decals were only one of several devices that Phillips used for producing strong images

without recourse to conventional forms of drawing. In Philip Morris 1962, for instance,

three identical advertisements printed on card, which the artist had discovered

in the gutter outside his local tobacconist, supply the entire image content. The structure

for the image is provided in an equally direct way by means of a recessed canvas

at the top, a strip of hardboard to support the advertisements, and a separate canvas

divided into three equal stripes of flat colour. Two tiny canvases of the same year,

Racer and We Three Ships, propose an equally anonymous method for creating images:

in each case a single image is repeated three times with the aid of a commercially available

stencil intended for the use of children. Neither of these methods we pursued

any further by Phillips: the stencils seemed too easy a solution, while the methods

underlying Philip Morris seem to have struck him as too similar to those employed

by Peter Blake.

Pin-up imagery, which had first appeared in the form of collage in paintings such as

For Men Only and Burlesque/Baby Throw, re-entered the paintings in 1962 as readymade

self-adhesive images. In Forces Sweetheart seductive poses are struck by four

women — each one the product of the Italian illustrator Moska — stuck onto star shapes

painted with blue gloss and then varnished over. The bold chevron design, overlaid

with the outline of a heart painted with the same shiny blue, captures with great directness

the razzle-dazzle and barely suppressed excitement of big cities at night, the

contrast of reflective with matt surfaces providing a convincing equivalent to the disorientating

effect of neon lights. In Distributor similar pin-ups are stuck onto a series

of panels which can be rearranged by the spectator at will, allowing a constantly renewable

permutation of images. Once more we are invited to take part in an imaginary

game, but one involving high emotional stakes: winning bears the promise of a

seductress reclining in anticipation, while losing is signified by the presence of a coldly

aloof seated figure. The international road sign placed along the central axis provides

a vivid warning of the ‘other dangers’ which lie in wait for all those involved in

games of sexual fantasy and seduction.

Once he had used these stick-on images, Phillips soon began to seek out other girlie

images of the 1940s in magazines, transcribing them onto paintings such as Four Stars

and Gravy for the Navy, both dating from 1963. The title as well as the image of the

latter was taken from a drawing by Vargas published in Esquire. Phillips recalls that he

liked such images not because they were from the ‘40s but because they corresponded

in feeling to the other elements he had been using, neither real nor unreal.

“They complemented each other, Therefore a diagrammatic image of a motorcar was

the same as this rather diagrammatic shorthand of a woman, They were both beautiful

in one sense, and in another sense not so beautiful. There is always a certain duality.

but again my emotional reaction was positive, and | was able to make aesthetic

judgments within this particular subculture of imagery. It’s quite amazing that even

with the most awful of material one can say “This is a good decal and this is a lousy

decal,” and “This is a good pin-up and this is a rotten pin-up,” or “This is a beautiful

machine.” One is already making decisions in an aesthetic way even in the choice.’

It is often assumed that Phillips was devoted primarily to Americans, but it should be

evident by now that this was not the case. ‘I’ve never been analytical about American

things. | like American things, but I also like Japanese things, | like French things, |

like Swiss things, American cars possibly | liked more, simply because of their greater

baroqueness; they just had more interesting things to paint in them than stylized

Italian cars.’ Even the presentation of goods from a consumer’s point of view, as

Phillips points out. was not particularly an American phenomenon. “The industrial

Revolution happened in Britain, as well as advertising. The Americans maybe took it

a bit further, but there’s not much intrinsic difference. It’s been here since Victorian

times, even though it has never pushed its nose out as aggressively.

Forever Corporation is one of the few paintings that comments explicitly on American

culture, but one would be hard-pressed to interpret it as mindless celebration of

American values. The juxtaposition of one of the stars of the New York art world,

Jackson Pollock — who, incidentally, had died six years earlier — with the Statue of

Liberty on a heraldic shield, a numbered grid, two tiger heads painted from decals,

and an anonymous beauty from a German magazine, reduces the famous painter to

the status of just another motif, no more and no less important than any other. The

title of the painting, borrowed from a science fiction novel, carries its own irony.

Without stretching the point too far, it should be noted that Pollock’s head was painted

from a poster of a New York gallery exhibition, the features transferred with the aid

of a tracing and then painted in tones of grey — the symbol of free painting transformed

into a replica of a photograph.

The very wilfulness of the unrelated elements and fragments in paintings such as

Forever Corporation and Kewpte Doll 1963/64 has its logic, for it provides an equivalent

to the arbitrary manner in which one receives sensations in the course of a normal

day. Bombarded by dissimilar visual experiences which make a uniform focus impossible,

one is forced to make a selection, taking in some things and not others according

to one’s own priorities. ‘Every day things are arbitrary.’ Phillips agrees, ‘and

my sensations are arbitrary. | look at a telephone kiosk and a car passing, a girl over

there and a window up there. . . There is a logic, but it’s a logic that 1 don’t want to

define.’



Historism and factuality are closely related in Phillips’s paintings. One is constantly

forced to re-examine the evidence to confirm whether what one thinks one sees is actually

there, First glances, as one knows through experience, are often misleading, In

order to encourage us to look closer, Phillips sometimes cuts into the surface, as in

SUPinsetER and iNsuperSET, both dating from 1963, in which the star shapes and

central panels alike take the form of inset canvases. By contrast, the triangles through

which the wall can be glimpsed in Spotlight 1962/3 are not cut into the canvas, but

are the result of the piecing together of separately-coloured wooden strips. The imaginary

identification of the triangles as prisms, through which light is refracted into the

colours of the spectrum, is taken further in Gravy for the Navy by the insertion of

pieces of clear glass. On occasion motifs which appear to be cut out, like the stars in

Kewpte Doll, in fact form part of an unbroken surface, just as images which appear to

be painted are sometimes stuck on and vice versa. In MULT ImotorPLICATION the

uppermost motorcycle is in relief, literally advancing from the picture plane as a

means of matching the image of forward movement.

AutoKUSTOMotive 1964, at 2.75 x 2.75 metres the largest canvas Phillips had yet

painted, restates a number of favoured devices and concerns while introducing elements

that were to be elaborated by the artist over the following decade. As before,

there are inset panels: the star-shaped canvases are primed but unpainted, while the

inset images of carburettors are drawn in first with line and tone and then sprayed with

colour from cans, the white surrounding area painted in last. As in previous works

such as Motorpsycho/Tiger, separate panels are appended to the main canvas, though

this is now taken a stage further so that the overall shape of the canvas takes on the

form of the image represented. The twin subjects of machinery and of vehicles in motion

= both already dealt with by Phillips and with a history stretching back at least

as far as the Futurists — are represented here in a particularly aggressive form. This

work marks, too, the first overt treatment of the theme of customizing, implicit already

in the use of decals in earlier paintings such as the Motorpsycho series. Largeness

of scale, too, is brought to a logical conclusion. ‘I remember saying that | wanted to

paint a car as big as a car and a house as big as a house. | was fascinated with this idea,

but | never really took it much further. It seemed to work on that scale.’

The shaped canvas was an increasingly popular device among figurative and abstract

painters alike in both Britain and America; among the artists who had availed themselves

of it were Hockney, Boshier, Jones, Richard Smith, Frank Stella and Ellsworth

Kelly. Although he returned to a shaped enclosure in the Random Illusion series and

other paintings of 1968. Phillips did not pursue the notion for the time being and

had no urge to bring the shape out into the third dimension. He recalls chat the decision

to take the idea no further was occasioned in part by the fact that Richard

Smith had already done so in works such as Piano and Gift Wrap, but adds that ‘I was

probably more concerned with other things — with the image and the definition of

the image.”

Phillips had early made a conscious decision to use images exactly as he found them,

reasoning that whatever it was that had stimulated his imagination could operate in

a similar way for the spectator if integrated into the painting in the same form.

Photographs and decals were thus stuck directly onto the surface. By 1963, however.

Phillips had come to desire a greater flexibility in his choice of material and now felt

sufficiently confident of his technical capabilities to be able to transcribe more complicated

images by hand.

The solution he devised was to take his own photographs and then to transcribe them

to the desired scale by projecting them directly onto the canvas. SUPrasetER and

INsuperSET provide the initial instances of this ‘first mechanization’ of the artist.

Phillips took photographs of details of pinball machines and then projected them as

black and white negatives, as he later did in Kewple Doll, giving the image a mysterious

and rather sinister quality.



Rather than relying merely on what was already available, Phillips thus began at quite

an early date to add to his arsenal of images by photographing them himself. ‘I’ve

got nothing against using any tool or piece of technology that is useful, and that is

quicker than doing it some other way. To me there was no sense, when it came to

using a projector, in trying to draw something exactly how it was just by copying it,

When you want the image, you might as well photograph it and project it, then you’re

free to do with it as you want.

If you want it exactly the same, which was usually the case, it was the most convenient

way of doing it. And aesthetically rather interesting, because one can manipulate

it in scale and reverse it, which you can’t do just by thinking.

The precision with which the carburettors are depicted in AutoKUS/OMotive, and

the increased complexity with which the elements are interrelated, owe much to

Phillips’s new reliance on the projector. More or less every element in the picture was

projected, from the English Ford Consul itself to the fragment of wording in herote

perspective, Phillips’s long-standing fascination with interpenetrating spatial layers,

implicit as early as For Men Only – Starring MM and BB, now takes on a new twist

with the adaptation of 3D presentation techniques from advertisements and billboards,

While making use however, of the deliberately misleading come-ons employed

by the graphic artist, Phillips destroys his own illusions by consciously breaking

into them; the most precisely-rendered elements, the carburettors, exist only as inserts

rather than as parts of a complete mechanism, and the form of the car itself is abruptly

truncated at both ends by the demands of the canvas, construction. The space is deliberately

confusing, Every element, of course, exists only as part of a flat surface.

Customizing was an American invention, a means of individualizing cars while at the

same time suggesting their potential for speed by purely pictorial means. The appeal

to Phillips was strong, for it provided an equivalent co the artist’s own process of

painting a canvas — in the dual sense of decorating a surface and of creating illusions

— adapted to the requirements of a utilitarian object. [In AutoKUSTOMotive an essential

difference is suggested between the technology that goes into the making of

machinery and the more traditional craft skills employed in customizing through a

contrast in techniques. The equation with customizing is carried through to the materials

themselves, since both the inset panels and striped image are painted with

Kandy Kolor, a translucent automobile paint sold in cans and intended to be sprayed

on polished metallic surfaces.

One must be cautious, however, about overstating Phillips’s involvement with customizing,

for it no more explains the qualities of the mid-sixties paintings than had the

jukebox or pinball machine references in the earlier works. ‘Customizing was a peripheral

interest at the time’, as the artist himself points out, ‘but it wasn’t the aesthetic

behind the paintings specifically.’ Cars and car parts feature in each of the eight

Custom Paintings which Phillips began on his arrival in New York in September 1964

on a two-year Harkness Fellowship, but these continue to be combined with unrelated

elements; labyrinths, diagrams of nuclear power stations and of a nineteenth century

distillery, heraldic patterns from Battersea funfairs, pin-ups, and an array of dazzling

abstract patterns and geometric devices.

Although the last of the Custom Paintings was not completed until 1967, the entire series

was planned in London in 1964 in the form of precisely worked-out drawings.

‘This is the first time | started it, the first time where | made a direct logical organization

of the whole working procedure of making preparatory drawings in colour, |

felt that obviously when [ went to New York | would have a cultural shock and that!

should take something with me so that | could get immediately to work.’ He took

with him not only the drawings, but also the slides which he had used in making

them, which were protected again onto the canvases.



By 1962 Phillips had begun to eliminate the most obvious kind of handwork from his

paintings, and the anonymity of image seemed increasingly to call for a comparable

anonymity of technique. Having already begun to spray paint, the airbrush seemed an

inevitable tool; the Fellowship now gave him the financial means to buy this and other

equipment which he had been wanting to use for some time. Phillips was quoted

in 1965 as praising airbrush artists as ‘wonderful artists technically’ with a lot to offer,

adding that “Technique can be aesthetic just as much as subject or anything else.’ One

of the appeals of the instrument was that it lay outside the recognised canons of fine

art.

‘The airbrush is synonymous with certain types of imagery that one uses; it’s an instrument

that’s used in technical illustration and graphic design. | could never understand

why there was so much against it, because it really is a fascinating thing. Given

a little bit of patience, eventually | could paint very rich areas of paint.’

More than ever before, Phillips’s work now took o

the character of painted collage,

the airbrush providing a continuity of surface as seamless as that of Max Ernst’s reprocessed

collages. The homogeneity of technique neutralized the sudden ruptures of

image, making it possible, for example, for an eighteenth century diagram to coexist

with owentieth century elements.

‘| never saw any reason why anything is not valid or useful in a painting. Anything

that happens to fit with my feeling for the painting. I’m not bound by any type of limitation

other than the limitation of myself at that particular time, and that is a constantly-

changing situation. It’s not true to say that I’m concerned with high-tech imagery…

| don’t see anything wrong with taking from wherever | feel when it feels night,

and age or period makes no great difference. It’s a question of convenience, availability

and accident.”

The figure in Custom Painting No. 2 1964/65, for instance, was taken ready-made

from the atrbrush manual with which Phillips was teaching himself the technique; the

nude in No. 5 1965, by contrast, was from a pin-up magazine, drawn out with the aid

of a projected slide and then painted in an invented scheme of black and pink.

“The figure is no more important than anything else in the painting. They’re all recycled

images which have been drawn by somebody else or reworked by somebody else.

The car, too, has been retouched, and the machine parts have certainly been drawn

out totally by somebody else.’ Phillips perceives the figure as another neutral image,

of no more interest than any other clement, ‘if | was concerned with the human condition

of the figure, | would be painting totally different paintings.Th’e girls that he

uses, as he himself points out, are generally removed in time, so that they have become

pictures, not people. He selects them, it is crue, because he likes them bur this is the

case with all his motifs. “Why is it that machine and not another machine? Why is it

always an automobile part and not a gas cooker or something? Every image is chosen

by my personal preference. lt makes no difference… Each particular element in that

picture — and | call them “elements” — is a device, amongst many devices, to produce

al painting.

Phillips’s attitude is not far removed from that of Léger, who wrote in 1952 that ‘One

may consider the human figure not for its sentimental value but only for its plastic

value. That is why in the evolution of my work since 1905 unul now the human figure

has remained purposely inexpressive.’ The figures in No. 5 and in later paintings

by Phillips such as Sefect-O-Mat Rear Axle 1971 and Ant-O-Matie Cudacutie 1972 recall

Léger, too, in the way that they float arbitrarily against the painted ground.

‘Léger’s things weren’t earthbound. That’s what interested me about his as opposite to

Magritte’s. Magritte’s are always in a normal setting, apart from the very early pieces,

and even then they were always a sort of half-landscape or something, It’s interesting

that Léger avoided the connotation of the usual Surrealist thing that it was a normal

environment. It was their particular kick of putting something strange in a normal

environment. | liked it when it was ous of this.”



Phillips devised his own system for producing the Custom Paintings, a method which

he continued to elaborate until the mid-seventies. Using oil paint mixed with Magna

— a medium which curtailed the drying time and thus made respraying more convenient

— he first painted in the backgrounds. having marked off the image areas with

masking tape and tissue paper. Designs such as the moiré pattern in No. 4 1965 were

invented, sprayed in blocks with the aid of stencils cut by the artist. The more detailed

areas were then painted in with the aid of projected slides. The shiny metallic surfaces,

which provide an other wordly ground similar to that of the gold leaf on icons, were

painted with regular artist’s quality silver ot! paint.

Although the Custom Paintings were all planned before Phillips’s arrival in New York,

visualized from the start as airbrushed pictures, the artist’s experience in New York nevertheless

instilled in him a respect for professionalism and an urge to take ideas to their

final conclusion. ‘] became more and more interested in making this total commitment

to something. I think that | learned from America… | think that | took my basic ideas

and I sort of doubled up and doubled up and doubled up on just how banal and aggressive

| can get, and how clichéd | can get. and | took it to the extremes. | think to

greater extremes than most of the Americans, because I really worked with banality and

painted it banal. They can be particularly nasty, because they’re so totally uncompromising

in every way, and using absolutely contemporary imagery. Some of the images,

I think, didn’t even get to the magazines before | used them, because | took them

straight from the photographer who made the commercials… | was just very interested

in seeing if | could make something from just opening a book and taking this out.’

The notion of collaboration implicit in Phillips’s work since 1960 — in his appropriation

of techniques from commercial art as well as in his useo f found material and of

images reflecting popular taste — was reformulated in the Custom Paintings with the

suggestion that art could be tailor-made to suit the requirements of a particular owner

or of the public at large. This idea became the subject of a collaborative project on

which Phillips began work in 1965 with the English artist Gerald Laing, Laing, who

moved to New York in 1964 at the invitation of the dealer Richard Feigen and who

had met Phillips briefly in London, was approached by Phillips with the idea of working

together. Thinking at first along the lines of producing a joint painting, they decided

instead to form themselves into a market research organization, Hybrid

Enterprises, with the aim of producing an art object determined by the demands of

the informed consumer.

Phillips and Laing together constructed ewo kits, containing samples of colours, patterns,

shapes and materials — from canvas, paint, wood and fabrics through to modern

synthetic and industrial materials such as plastics and metals — and devised a questionnaire,

with the intention of feeding the results through a computerT.he 137 people

interviewed – mainly from New York, but also from London, Los Angeles,

Chicago and other cities – were all critics, collectors, and arts administrators rather

than artists. The computer was an integral part of the process, and thanks to the support

of an influential art-lover the sophisticated set-up of the Bell Telephone

Company headquarters was made available to them. Through their lack of experience

with the technology involved, they found that they had framed the questions in such

a manner that the results could scarcely be fed into the computer.

The colours, materials and dimensions were averaged mathematically, while the

shapes had to be decided upon in a more subjective manner.

‘There were contradictions. but we carried these contradictions all the way through.

We had to interpret, but the materials and everything else that was there was demanded.

It was a democratic art object. The majority vote got through… Using a

computer was more of a gestural thing than an actual necessity, The whole thing was

gestural; it was hardly a serious scientific analysis, but it was carried through to a logical

conclusion.’

Both Laing aa nd Phillips admit ftankly that the choice offered was not as free as the

nn Se Nee ee ee eel cee AE een ome

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imagery, even though the interviewees were offered the alternatives of ‘abstract’ or

‘figurative’ — but their concern was with the process itself rather than with the particular

form of the final piece. The resulting sculpture incorporated aluminium, plexiglass

and a fluorescent tube within a wedge shape. the striped pattern at the side producing

a chevron image with the aid of the reflective metal surface. [ts composition,

as Laing acknowledges, was ‘an assemblage of trendy 60s notions’, as well as an anticipation

ol the renewed popularity which sculpture was soon to enjoy in New York

in the form of Minimal art.

The question of whether the Hybrid sculpture qualifies as an art object does not worry

Phillips. “The gesture was the art. The object was the result of a gesture. Whether

it is art or not is a question of individual interpretation, and that applies all the way

through the last fifty years. Some people still don’t even accept Picasso, What makes

art, anyway: paint on canvas? That’s no definition of art. [ prefer to paint, but it’s the

process of building up ideas and extending the horizons — onc should use every possible

technical means, if it is in one’s interests and availability, Other people probably

don’t even use masking tape. [t’s a personal choice. The results are what count. What

ones does in berween is hardly important.’

Hybrid was presented with a deadpan trony befitting an object produced blatantly to

the demands of the market, although Laing now speaks of the project as an ‘attack on

the way in which the New York art scene was being exploited’, saying that the critic

Gene Swenson was the only person who full grasped the corruption they were exposing.”

“The project was essentially satirical; it achieved its own life, so to speak, but

when we started it we did not necessarily intend to carry it right to its conclusion…

Commercial success was slightly surprising, and indicated the necessiry of the project.

In other words, clients hadn’t got the faintest idea of what it was they were buying,

Phillips agrees that the high sales of Ayérid — one of which was later acquired by the

prestigious Fogg Arc Museum at Harvard — confirmed the project, but says that ‘One

would have been equally as happy just to have carried through the gesture. That it was

successful in these sort of terms afterwards and that it got enormous publiciry, critical

acclaim and censure and made Life magazine was very amusing, but that’s just the

state of the art world in New York. lt was an amusing thing to do.’

During the year that he was working on Hybrid, Phillips made a series of about six

sculptures, his first and only excursions into the medium, some of which he showed

in the Primary Structures exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum in 1966, Made of

formica, plexiglass and lacquered wood panels slotted together, these constructions

were more like celief paintings than sculptures, hanging on the wall but also resting

on the floor. Only one of these works survives; the experiment was short-lived. ‘I don’t

think the sculptures were as good as the paintings, and | couldn’t see at that particular

stage how | could develop it any further. The use of other materials was interesting,

industrial processes, It wasn’t so far removed from the paintings, it was just that

there was no figurative imagery; it was other types of imagery. At che time | wasn’t capable

of assessing the image content of my work in other terms.”

Certain elements of these sculptures, however, such as the strips of coloured plexiglass,

reappear in later paintings such as Tiger- Tiger and SyncrojectoRAMA, both executed in

1968, where they provide a decorative but physically substantial framework for the

image. Having returned to Europe in 1966 Phillips took up painting where he had

left off. The germ of the Random Illusion series, for example — a group of paintings

made in 1968-69 — came from a drawing which Phillips had produced in London in

164.

In view of the artist’s continuity of purpose and procedure over the years, it cannot be

said that his change of environment has had any significant effect on the content of his

work. His decision to make his home abroad was made for personal reasons, including

his marriage in 1970, with career considerations taking second place. ‘] don’t see why

I should sacrifice my life for my art,” he commented recently, ‘Picasso didn’t’

Nevertheless there is no denying thar his prolonged absence from England has resulted

in an unreasonable neglect of his work. In spite of the fact that a retrospective exhibition

of his paintings and drawings was held in Germany in 1972, until now he has

been granted only a single one-man show in Britain (ac the Waddington Galleries in

1976) and has taken part only sporadically in major survey shows organized here. In

part, the artist admits, this isolation was selfimposed as a means of pursuing his work

without the glare of publicity. ‘I’ve avoided presenting myself publicly for a long time

— since 1972. | was free enough to try things out, because | have not been under constant

observation.’ During the whole of this period, Pop has been succeeded in critical

fashion by Conceptual Art, Minimal Art, Performance Ant, Land Art, PhotoRealism

and New Image, to name only the most talked-about of the recent trends. Phillips has

watched them all come and go and has responded to some of what they have to offer

without allowing himself to be deflected from his fundamental purpose.

Phillips’s work of the late sixties and early seventies takes to an extreme his interest at

the time in anonymous surfaces and in a nontactile use of paint. As early as 1965 he

had spoken of his involvement with ‘commercial techniques such as those that give

the effect of a printed surface’ similar to that of a glossy magazine. As he later explained,

however, his use of such techniques was occasioned not by an intellectual indentification

with the mass media but with a direct visual response. “If one chooses

something from a magazine or from a poster, or what have you, this thing has technique,

it has been made, and I’m particularly sympathetic to the way something looks

before | choose that to use.’

Although Phillips had produced his first screenprint in 1964 at the invitation of the

Institute of Contemporary Arts, it was not until 1968, the year in which he produced

his major portfolio PNEUmanes, Unat he experimented with the technique in his

paintings, The engines in Random Elfuston No. 3 and Random [llusion No. 4 are both

screenprinted in black and then touched up by hand. The technique did not hold

Phillips’s interest for long, partly because fourcolour screenprinting, which he would

have preferred, would have been too expensive, but also because silkscreened images

had already been used by Warhol and Rauschenberg, “lt wasn’t what | wanted and it

had already been done so often that it became an aesthetic in itself, and it would be

misinterpreted.” Phillips found that he had more flexibility with the airbrush alone.

‘The only change from the previous airbrushed paintings was one from oil to acrylic

paint and tempera, a practical necessity as Magna was not easily obtainable in Europe

and there was no other compatible medium at that time. Tempera was used for areas

in which delicate spraying was required, as it atomized more finely than acrylic and

had less tendency to clog up the needle.



Unlike artists such as Paolozzi, who have viewed the making of their work by others as part

of their technological aesthetic, Phillips considered the use of assistants simply as a

convenience. Had he been able to afford airbrush specialists, he would have hired

them out of deference ro their technical expertise, but he had no intention of delegating

any of the decisions to others. He stopped using assistants when he found that

they were not making a significant difference to the amount of work he could get

through.

Another practical consideration which relates to the increased complexity of Phillips’s

work from 1970 was his construction in that year of the Select-O-Mat, an image bank

made according to his own specifications which incorporated ten miniature back-projection

screens and ten projectors. Information was recorded in the form of 35mm

slides, each bearing a separate number to allow for rapid scanning and retrieval, with

the possibility of comparing ten separate images at once, There was no possibility of

printing out the images; it was simply a way of sorting through the material in a more

systematic manner.

‘It was just another gesture’, says Phillips now of the Select-O-Mat. ‘It was a waste of

moncy, but it was something that | felt | had to continue with the whole process of

working.’ He dismantled the apparatus in 1974, having used it for the series of small

Compositions and Select-O-Mat Variations, and has not had recourse to it again. The

implications of random selection from a wide range of imagery, however, have continued

to interest him. Phillips stated his position clearly, though not without irony,

in the form of an advertisement for the ‘Phillips Select-O-Mat’ on the last page of the

catalogue for his 1972 Miinster retrospective. ‘Your Choice’, reads the advertisement,

‘Plus standard options, mated together to just exactly the right configuration.’

Reproduced alongside is a varied range of images — mechanical parts, diagrams, a customized

Plymouth and pin-ups — several of which feature in Phillips’s paintings of the

ime.

“That was a presentation idea. The idea was for me to walk around with my little case

full of goodies and say, “Here you are, sir”, and youd show him everything and hed

say, “Vd like that and that and that”, And Vd go click click click and that was that. It

was a statement | wanted to make of my anonymous position. That anything, it didn’t

really matter, could work in this painting… and that your choice is no more important

than my particular choice.’ Phillips’s chinly-veiled but deadly serious proposal

was taken up by only one collector, who commissioned a group portrait of his family

in a Mosatkbild format in the midseventies. ‘We discussed what he particularly

wanted, so with my own gentle irony | did exactly that and the customer was very sarisfied.”

[f the gesture seems extreme to us today, it is only because we have become accustomed

to the idea of the artist as an eccentric individual responsible to no one but

himself. Phillips’s recognition of the possibility of working to a patron’s demands

merely takes into account the traditional réle occupied by artists until the end of the

nineteenth century.

The images employed in Front Axle and the subsequent mammoth canvases are of essentially

the same kind used in Phillips’s earlier paintings: shiny new cars, seventeenth

century spectrum diagrams, scientific illustrations, machine parts, birds and women,

all arrayed with flagrant disregard of the laws of gravity against the background of a

coloured grid or of a dynamic pattern based on a found diagram. The vulgarity is taken

to a deliberate extreme, nowhere more so than in the case of Rear Axie’s mindlessly

grinning nude, her balloon-like breasts seeming to bear her afloat. Sleek machinemade

objects are thrust towards us as beautiful and desirable commodities, Phillips is

adamane that his paintings were never intended as celebrations of ‘technicolour culture’,

but accepts that the materialistic streak of his work in the sixties and early seventies

might have had subconscious origins. ‘Again it comes from the background, an

industrial background, from being poor and having certain materialistic desires which

I must admit are now saturated and satisfied, but were perhaps necessary. | don’t know

how important that was, [ can’t say. That would be easter for an outsider to say.’

In Phillips’s own estimation the large Art-O-Matic paintings of 1972 were the cumulative

statement of the aesthetic which he had established eight years earlier in taking

up the airbrush. Feeling that he had made his statement, he now began work on a series

of much smaller standard-sized canwases as a means of ‘winding down. In all

about forty or fifty Compositions and Select-O-Mat Variations were produced, turned

out quickly ‘like real machine productions’ according to a set system, without the aid

of preliminary drawings. ‘| could have done another five hundred, but | had enough.

Having made your gesture along those lines of machine belt production, with loads

of variations and working out exactly how you’re going to do it, there’s no point in going

on.

The choice of Composition as a title reflects the emptying out of the most blatant kinds

of images, the impact provided now soleiy by the conjunction of mechanical with

brightly-coloured geometric elements, but in essence they are no more and no less abstract

than the preceding paintings. ‘From this point of view, aff the paintings are abstract

paimtings. From chat | mean that there’s no image which gives you any insight

into my paintings or into my working principles, because they’re all equal. and when

they’re all equal they become, in these terms, abstract, But | hate the word abstract, it

doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a word of convenience. There’s nothing abstract about

these paintings.” Phillips acknowledges, however, that he had begun to reassess the

concent of his work. ‘At this stage now | was beginning to become worried about impersonal

surface, and | was starting to become worried about the nature of the image.

I was slowly becoming aware of other feelings chat | had that | was not bringing out,

and | was slowly becoming stuck to a certain extent. This was like the end of the whole

machine work.’

The Compositions and Select-O- Mat Variations beat no signs of a change of heart. In

spite of their small scale, they are endowed with great presence through their clarity

of form and colour, rightness of placement, and spatial complexity. Painted in some

cases with glitter on aluminium and sealed with a tough acrylic varnish, they have the

strangely seductive beauty of wellmade machines. Like the large canvases which preceded

them, they also reveal a number of affinities with the late work of Kandinsky,

which Phillips has long admired: in their geometric scaffolding, in the scattering of

Images against patterned grounds in vivid hues, in che spatial contradictions of multiple

interpenetrating planes, and even in the choice of a panoramic format, Each picture

provides an emotionally intense spectacle for che senses. The machine, which had

been introduced subconsciously as a stand-in for the figure as carly as

Motorpsycho/ Tiger 1962, continues to perform an implicitly human réle, with drill

bits, coils and springs appearing to act out a ritualistic sexual drama. In a literal sense,

however, every clement continues to represent nothing but itself, Any further meanings

which the paintings may suggest are not part of a symbolic programme, but arise

from the connotations of the objects represented

The Minster retrospective in 1972 provided Phillips with the opportunity to reassess

his position. Feeling that he had exhausted the possibilities of the positive ready-made

image but wishing to retain the substance of his working methods, he began in 1973

to look for ways out of his self-imposed cul-de- sac that would allow him greater flexibility

without changing him into ‘an unrecognizable person’, In order to give himself

greater freedom to experiment. he decided for the time being to keep himself our of

the public cye, taking part in no exhibitions until 1974.

Ac the end of 1972 Phillips spent the Christmas holidays in the Swiss mountains,

where he made a series of collages incorporating fragments of automobile parts. On

returning home he began work on two separate canvases based on these collages, deciding

in the end to join them as a diprych. The resulting painting, Automobilia 1973,

reveals more straightforwardly than ever before the coltage origins of Phillips’s work.

‘I’ve always liked the idea of a painted collage. It applies very well, somehow, to the

way [ work, When you’re dealing with imagery that is relatively precise, but you’re alx0

dealing with other relationships, you cant really mess about on the canvas.

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[ can’t spend a week painting an image and then decide | want to move it two inches

in the other direction.’



Although Automobilia was the first of a proposed series, the remaining works never

materialized. In hindsight Phillips recognizes it as a major painting in his development,

one which holds the seeds of his present working methods, but at the time it

looked so different to him from his other work that he could sce no way of pursuing

this particular line, The fact that the imagery, while drawn from unrelated sources –

there are fragments of a BMW, a Volkswagen beetle, a Volkswagen bus and of the intcrior

and exterior of several unidentifiable American cars — linked up thematically

may also have been one of the causes of his uncertainty.

A central issue underlying Phillips’s doubts in the mid-seventices was that of his selfimposed

cule of anonymity of surface. He was beginning to miss the sensual qualities

of paint, and in Art- O-Matic Riding High 1973/74 — a canvas which in its format and

range of elements pairs with Art-O-Matic Blue Moon 1973 — he began hesitantly to

use a brush again, rather than relying solely on the airbrush.

Phillips’s thoughts about abandoning the airbrush, however, were short lived, for in

1974, motivated in part by a spirit of competition with the newly-arrived Photo-

Realist movement, he returned to nontactile paint, with a particular emphasts on the

qualities of a photographic surface. With a diversity of illusionistically-rendered interlocking

images contained within the stabilizing format of a regular grid, the

Mosaikbild paintings of 1974-76 are in cervain respects the most technically dazzling

pictures that Phillips has produced.

‘Photo-Realism came along and this disturbed me because it did produce another aspect

of highly technicized paintings done very, very well… When | went to New York,

I looked up Chuck Close and Ben Schonzeit out of pure curiosity about how these

guys worked, because they were both using airbrushes and in such a way that made

me look like a fumbling amateur in terms of technique. And technique still fascinated

me. So I fele that somewhere down the line | had co try, at least, but certainly not

just painting a photograph… [t was so banal. but the surfaces, and the use of the airbrush,

were so incredible: the sensuousness that everybody else would find not sensuous,

but I found tremendously sensuous, made me rethink a little bit.’

The example of Photo-Realism spurred Phillips to return to the photograph in place

of the diagrammatic elements he had been using. ‘I fele that | had to update everything,

and | was obviously very wrong in that, but the paintings worked OK. The

photograph as was a mistake, and I also made what | would now consider a mistake

with the definition of the image, in such a way that | still wasn’t solving my problem.

I was only giving myself more problems, in fact, but | didn’t realize it at the time. |

thought that by a change of nature of image — the process remaining the same — from

the diagrammatic to the photographic, I’d broaden my range of imagery so that |

wouldn’t become again closed into this system of working. In fact all | did was change

one prison cell for the next prison cell, so to speak. But [ learned a lot from doing it.

Some of the paintings were OK and | was able to carry on.’

The basic elements of Mosatkbild 6 x 12.1974, the first of the series, can be traced back

to Phillips’s earlier work. The use of a grid as a compositional device, for instance, o¢-

curs as carly as Purple Flag 1960 and features prominently as a ground in the huge canvases

of the early seventies. The display of fragments of images across the surface, and

the playing offo f one spatial system against another, are likewise common features of

Phillips’s work. This is the first instance, however, in which the fragments of positively-

rendered images interpenetrate each other through the grid. The resulting change

in the form of the painting is considerable.

In view of the way in which the Select-O-Mat apparatus prefigured the form of the

Mosatkbild paintings, it is tronic that it was only recently that Phillips had dismantled

this tenscreen back-projection unit. The solution for the paintings came not from the

Select-Q-Mat but from a newly-introduced device called Multi-Vision, which Phillips

came across by accident in a camera exhibition in Aunch, Consisting ol a series of

computer-guided back-projection units Mulu-Vision was designed to present a sequence

of pictures which could be overlapped, fragmented, or presented whole.

Although Phillips did not see such a mechanism in operation but learned about it

from a book, it appealed to him immediately as another product of technology intended

for use outside of a fine art context. It struck him as a good way of formally

approaching a picture using photographic imagery, one which, moreover, provided an

alternative to the intuitive balancing of elements on which he had previously relied.

Having first experimented with the grid forny in some small collages, Phillips set to

work on Mosatkbild 6 x 12 in an impromptu fashion, with no preconceived ideas

about the imagery he would use. The entire canvas was taped up to form the grid, with

the areas around the boxes to be sprayed masked off. Starting at random with the image

of the dog, Phillips decided to use only those sections of the picture which had interesting

or readable information, The selection of which squares to fill with subsequent

images was made in a similar fashion until all the squares were filled. The bustlength

portrait of Elvis Presley was added last, not out of any particular interest in the

subject but as an image which filled the area conveniently.

Since it was not necessary for the painting to have the immediate legibility required

in normal MultiVision, Phillips felt free to exaggerate the implicit notion of simultancity.

As a result, even the smaller of the Moszikbild picuures such as La Doré and

Supergirl teem dizzyingly with abrupt breaks and unexpected juxtapositions, stopping

just this side of claustrophobic congestion. Thanks once again to the homogeneity of

surface, all these contradictory types of space and of illusion are made to coexist.

La Doré and Supergirl are distinguished from the rest of the series by their particular

surface qualities. First of all the canvas was sanded down until it was completely

smooth. The new variety of artificial Dutch paint with which they were then sprayed

has the characteristics of gloss or automobile paint but with a greater intensity and

depth of colour, thanks to the admixture of fine pigments. The layer of protective varnish,

which Phillips used to tone down the glossiness of the paint, gives the surface a

satin finish which was ideal for Phillips’s purposes at the time. Exaggerated in colour

and sleek in finish, the result approximates in a fitting manner the appearance of a

photograph. Phillips’s return to a photographic in place of a diagrammatic image in

the Mosaikbild series brought him back to the same kind of motifs which he had been

using prior to the Compesttions of 1972 — cars, pin-ups, animals, advertising imagery

~ though treated in a different manner. Previously he had masked the area around the

images to get a high definition, but he had now come to the conclusion that the hard

edges which resulted were not appropriate, because ‘things aren’t comprised of hard

edges.’ | He settled instead for a stunning surface effect, accepting as its price the blurring

of form around the edges.

It was at this time also that Phillips began to use his own high-definition photographs

as reference material for the paintings. As long ago as 1963 Phillips had been raking

his own photographs as a means of adding to his armoury of images, in works such as

S$UPinsetER and INsuperSET. n those days, however, it was as a matter of convenience

only that he took 35mm slides of material that had already been processed into

two dimensions — for example, the designs on pinball machines, or diagrams and illustrations

from books and magazines — so that it could be projected onto the canvas

and copied out. Since 1975, however, Phillips has been prepared to ‘manufacture’ his

own ‘found’ material, choosing the actual objects he wants to use and having them

photographed professionally under carefully controlled conditions with a large format

camera. This gives him not only greater flexibility in the choice of image and of its

particular configurations, but also a much finer degree of detail. Whether the image

be of a lower, a parrot or a snake, however, every motif has been translated into two

dimensions before the painting is begun. Nothing is painted directly from life. No

fundamental change, in other words, has taken place in Phillips’s manner of working.

The first paintings based on this kind of high-definition photograph, Mosaikbild

Sx 5/Supergir! 1975 and Mosatkbild/Displacements 1976, were occasioned by personal

considerations. “My wife Claude said to me once, “You’te. always painting women,

why don’t you ever paint me?” So being a nice guy | said, “Okay, why now?” She looks

okay, she looks as good as all the pin-up girls. | took her to a photographer’s studio

and photographed her with a professional pin-up photographer, | got a load of photographs,

then | chose again in the same way the ones that appealed to me, and put

them in the patnting. So the process, in fact, is no different. It was just a question of

a personal thing with Claude, but there’s no great difference. Instead of a found object,

she became, in a sense, an archetype for all of these things. They’re images for all

images.



Although the kinds of images pictured in the Mosaikbild paintings were as much a

part of life in 1974 as they had been in the early 1960s, Phillips recognized that the

cultural situation had changed and that such material had begun to outwear its usefulness

for him. Early in 1976, a week before the grid paintings were exhibited at the

Waddington Galleries, Phillips spoke of his desire to change the direction of his work:

‘| don’t want to backtrack. | think that there are uncountable possibilities still, but

think that they have to be said in other ways.’ Aware that his use of the airbrush had

hardened into a formula, he felt the need to reintroduce a degree of ambiguity into

his work. ‘I begin to feel that it’s a mistake, generally, to make something foo obvious,

because it doesn’t feed the intellect or the feeling. This, | think, ts also one of the

downfalls of certain types of American painting, that it was all there for you. That was

the point of people like Stella, Noland, and the Minimalists… | think when it’s just

there, there is nothing left. The world is full of artefacts, and once it’s been said, | can’t

see any reason to go on saying it. And this is something that | have with my own work,

that doesn’t apply to the other people but that applies to certain elements of my own

painting, of having made it so bloody obvious.’

One of the paintings shown in the Waddington exhibition, Solitaire is the Only Game

in Town 1976, is cited by Phillips as proofof the changes that he was beginning to impose

on his work. ‘I was very concerned not only with the nature of the image, but

with the nature of the thing in general. | didn’t like it full of these photographic things,

so we got this simpler blank canvas with things, which is mot unrelated to my new

paintings, except that the image ts still hard and defined. [ went through this whole

period, then, of seeking new combinations of different imagery.

On moving into a new house and studio in 1976, Phillips began work on a group of

paintings that were formulated in direct reaction to the Mosatkbild series. The shared

characteristics of paintings such as No Focus Frames 1976/77, Clasufications May Vary

197677, Untitled 97GI77, Rustic lee Ray 1977, Greetings 1977 and Carnival 1977

make it possible to view these as a selfcontained series. The grid structure, which

Phillips had come to view as a trap, has now given way to a field of modulated colour

which provides, as in his paintings of the carly sixties, space in which to relate the various

elements. In place of the claustrophobic clutter of interpenetrating images —

which, apart from anything else, involved the slow and tedious work of producing a

uniform finish — a similarly active surface ts now achieved through the scattering of

points of focus.

Apart from areas of colour modulation by glazing, the atrbrush was hardly used in the

making of these paintings. The highly-detailed images were all painted with extremely

fine brushes, with many of the motifs transcribed with the aid of an cpidiascope

from large format highdefinition colour transparencies taken under the artist’s direction.

‘Having gone to such lengths with the airbrush before, | felt chat | meeded to

learn how to highly define an image. | scill was not certain about my image but I knew

that there was something wrong, so | was changing the image. But paintings that

looked like photographs weren’t right. | wanted them to have more solidity.’

Even before returning to handbrushed surfaces, Phillips had begun to look closely

again at Old Master paintings in early 1976 that one of the spurs for looking at earlier art was the lack of visual

stimulation provided by recent developments such as Conceptual Art, the ideas

of which he thought were intriguing but the form of which he found unsatisfying, ‘lt

leaves me rather empty, so | find myself now going and looking at paintings that I’ve

never looked at, but particularly paintings. | spend most of my time in a national

gallery when | go to a city… which is fascinating. Probably because there’s such a time

difference that | dont understand, anyway, so that there’s a fantastic mystery there in

the beginning, But the paint ts a whole other thing in itself”

The introduction of a more tactile quality to the paint surface, still tightly controlled,

but evidently handworked, is only one of several new features to appear in paintings

such as No Focus Frames. Although every image is treated in a positive fashion as given

material to be reproduced without alteration, a clear differentiation ts now made

between those elements which have been found readymade, such as the Alpine landscape

view, and those which have been photographed under the arust’s direction, such

as the parrot, scissors and lettering. The found clement is presented as a flat photograph,

thus denying its own illusionism. The elements devised by the artist, on the

other hand, have been photographed under a strong light, thus casting strong shadows

which, when reproduced in paint, reinforce the sense of srompe-f oeil realism with

which the objects are depicted.



Specific enclosed space rather than the ambiguously-defined shallow space of the lave

sixties and early seventies paintingsT.he pocket of space which is thus created around

each object is fartened out again as soon as one’s eye moves away from that image,

producing a series of spatial jumps which give the surface a great tension and vitaliry.

It is as if the painted background were a kind of weightless no-man’s land, with each

image as a planet with its own gravitational pull, a potent metaphor for the inexplicable

fascination exerted by painted representations of ordinary things.

The unexplained light source and sharp shadows in Phillips’s paintings of the late

seventies are as ominous and threatening as those in a Hitchcock thriller, This is

no longer the specifically urban menace of the early work, but a more generalized

psychological tension, Some of the imagery, it is truc, is fairly obvious in its connotations

— open scissors poised for violence, insect and animal-like tools, a

writhing female python, and in the case of Carnival a masked head and gloved

hands — but this does not explain why even the lilies of the nwo Unritled 1978

paintings are not tame and pretty flowers but spiky, evil-looking objects. It wouid

be wrong, moreover, to ascribe too conscious an intention on Phillips’s part, for the

initial appearance of flowers in his work was not his own choice but that of the collector

who commissioned the picture. ‘It doesn’t make any difference to me’,

Phillips remarked a year later, ‘because I’m not attached to these things.’

Conscious, however that flower imagery was almost repellent to many people as

something bordering on kitsch, he remarked that this added to his interest in the

motif rather than detracting from it.

‘| can’t psychoanalyze myselfi n my own work’, explained the artist in October 1979.

“That’s probably why I just paint snakes’, the implication being that the subject was

as good as any other. The python, after all, offered to him as a model by an acquaintance,

had recently shed her skin and thus looked particulariy beautiful. In the same

conversation, however, Phillips bemoaned at length the cynical manipulation of the

art world, the lack of any real contact with art on the part of the public, and the

doubts that beset any artist, no matter how dedicated, about the importance of his

own work in a wider social context. Assailed by the apparent bleakness of the siruation,

the artist asked rhetorically, ‘Is it just that I’m going through a depressive period?”

If the pair of Mediator paintings and related works of the late seventies reflect this despair,

however, it was not that the artist was making a deliberate statement but that

his work. as always, was based in his own subjective outlook. “The painting has no

symboli¢ implications because it was derived, like all the other paintings, emotionally…

Symbolism is a rather serious and complicated science and art. You can’t just shulfle

around on the outside of it. It’s better to do it, as Jung would have preferred it, from

the unconscious, As soon as you become programmed, it loses its potency, There’s

nothing wrong later in describing tt from an unconscious point of view. Say one reads

through related material and comes across a word reference that somehow fits with

that. Then it’s right; then you say, “Okay, thar’s for that.” But it’s again an unconscious

selection, which is a similar activity to the painting.’

The sense that the Mediator paintings, in particular, might have hidden meanings was

not lost on the artist, who had worked on them obsessively for a period of months.

On finishing them he consulted a dictionary of symbols to try to make some sense of

them for himself, and found in this source a ue for the paintings which seemed appropriate.‘]

started to become involved afterwards, when they became obvious. It

looked rather symbolic so | started to check it all out. It still didn’t mean very much

to me, anyway, so | preferred to leave it. It’s there, it came out, and it’s over with, whatever

it was. Perhaps it was a rather peculiar period, but it’s gone now.” As soon as he

became aware that the lilies and snakes would be misinterpreted, he abandoned them,

just as he had discardedearlier obsessive images when intuitive choice was in danger

of becoming codified.

Phillips has always been his own most severe critic, and the changes in his work inevitably

can be accounted for by his urge to approach the same range of issues from

different points of view. Feeling that there was still a disjunction in his paintings between

image and coloured background, the artist began to experiment with coloured

spotlights on objects as a means of fusing object and ground in a more direct manner.

Flowers and Chain 1978 and Balls and Chain No. 11978 are ewo of a group of paintings

which he produced using this system, each a maximum of one metre square and

featuring a deliberately limited range of props including a owig, feathers, screws, metal

balls, a chain and flowers. Once again Phillips availed himself of a technical appacatus,

a set of miniature fibre lights in primary colours which can be focused and optically

mixed; a tool intended for commercial photography, it was purchased by

Phillips ready-made.

The system employed was a straightforward one. Objects were placed in position, the

lights were manipulated to the desired colour and position, and the resulting configuration

was then photographed. The colour transparency, projected with an epidiascope.

supplied all the necessary information for the painting, so that no further decisions

regarding composition, colour or image had to be made. The artist was thus left

free to concentrate on working the surface to a seductive density. The only limitation,

governed by the range of lights he was working with, was that the objects had to be

fairly small. As Phillips had made the decision to paint each object at approximately

life size, with the canvas transcribed from a single transparency, this meant that there

was a built in restriction in terms of the canvas format that could be used. Given a

larger set of fibre lights, however, greater flexibility of scale could be achieved.

Having introduced shadows into his paintings, Phillips now treated light itselfas a

palpabie substance, not as ethereal or ephemeral matter but as an object with material

form. ft is, after all, in the very mature of the medium that any representation should

partake of the same degree of actualiry through the simple fact that it is composed of

paint. {t is not light chat the artist paints, but pools of colour, not flowers, but a sequence

of marks transcribed from a photograph. This embodiment of metaphorical

suggestion within factualiry accounts also for the dramatic, even theatrical, air of the

paintings, the inanimate objects picked out by spotlights as if acting out an obscure

performance for our benefit,



The second half of the 1970s was something of a crisis period for Phillips, although

there is no doubt that he produced some memorable paintings during this time and

introduced to his work new elements which continue to suggest further possibilities.

The paintings which he began in the autumn of 1980-Roadrunner, followed by The

Pink One, Repetition of a Night-Time Safari, Aboriginal, Persistence of Desire, and Halt

the O in Vogue — at first sight look startlingly different in form from the previous work,

but closer examination reveals a number of ways in which standard preoccupations are

perpetuated. The general effect of sparseness and the disposition of elements as scattered

points of focus across the surface have much in common with works such as No

Focus Frames, although the trompe-o/er depictions of complete objects have given way

to dlusionistic renderings of fragments of images. The spatial jumps which appeared

to take place behind the surface in those paintings through the modelling of the image

against painted shadows are treated in the new works as a physical realiry in front

of the surface, with sculptural elements made of plastic wood appended to the canvas

so as to produce actual shadows. The use of relief elements, it will be recalled, occurred

in Phillips’s work as carly as 1961, with the wooden panels of paintings such as

fariGame and For Men Only — Starring MM and BB, and cast shadows had first appeared

in Philip Morris 1962, providing further evidence of the consistency of the

artist’s logic over the years.



The hypnotic intensity with which images such as the snakes in the Mediator pictures

had been painted, crucial to the fascination exerted by these works, had a major practical

disadvantage: it took too long. Phillips complained at the end of 1979 that he

found it difficult to sustain the same degree of concentration over a period of two or

three months in order to produce a single image. “If ‚m working intensely on an area

and I’m making an image and concentrating on the colours, on texture and on the

quality of the paint’, he explained, by the time he had finished with this one clement

he had ‘lost interest in the painting’as far as other aspects of it were concerned. Phillips,

of course. also had increasing reservations about the use of images which might be construed

as overtly symbolic. In the new paintings Phillips found that he could achieve a

similar intensity of effect in a shorter period and without the symbolic obtrusiveness

by, employing the same fineness of cechnique to fragments of similar images; a snake

skin and zebra skin fi igure, for example, in Repetition of a Ni ight- TTii me Safari, although

their main function now is as tactile and emotionally enigmatic images.

The concern with a heavily worked surface incorporating changes ‘of pace, a central

feature of the spotlight paintings such as Flowers and Chain 1978, is carried in the new

works to extremes of unassuming virtuosity, Admitting to ‘a semianarchistic point of

view’, Phillips deliberately ‘mixed a lot of things together that arent supposed to mix,

acrylic and all paint together with wax, in other words water-based and oil-based

paints’, with modelling paste to slow down the drying ume of the acrylic and an emulsifier

to fuse together the diverse elements, Different techniques are also used for separate

areas, Certain elements are painted with straight oil paint with medium, while

others include graphite for a shiny surface or modelling paste to create a more solid

substance. The background is coated with a sfemato layer mixed with wax. hardening

and thus making more visible the controlled gestures of the brush. The surface is some

times built up with additional pieces of canvas or with three-dimensional elements

modelled in Plastiform plastic wood, with the result that it is difficult to cell from a

distance which elements are physically real and which are painted illusions on the surface.

In more recent paintings in the series such as Senne! 1981 and DUAL performance

1981/82 the canvas is cut into or built out even further. All these contrasts are

means of enticing the viewer into scrutinizing the surface, just as they had been in the

paintings produced prior to the artist’s adoption of the airbrush in 1964, in which

similar contrasts were orchestrated berween glossy and matt surfaces, collaged and imprinted

areas, polished wood and pumiced canvas, gestural marks and anonymous

surface.

The new paintings. enriched by twenty years’ experience, can be said to have brought

Phillips full circle. In view of the appeal which the collage principle has always held

for him, it should come as no surprise that their drastic revision of form was initially

developed in a series of collages made in 1979-80, and that each canvas originated as

a transcription of a particular work on paper. As always the images have been found

ready-made, this time taken primarily from fashion magazines and books. Rather

than accepting the material exactly as he found it, however, Phillips overpainted the

coloured backgrounds as well as the printed elements of the collages so as to intensify

their physical presence while making their identity more mysterious and compelling.



The source material, though altered, infiltrates the paintings in an intriguingly

oblique way. Clues are provided by some of the more recognizable images such as fabrics,

sequins and animal skins, even the method of presentation tecalling fashion photography

in which figures are posed against coloured backdrops. In the Gerins diprychs,

in particular, the armature by which the various fragments are connected bears

a strong suggestion of human presence, the individual elements and precise choice of

colour attributing a specific personality to each panel. The associations, however, are

never made explicit, so that the paintings of necessity remain open-ended and perplexing.

The shock of recognition which one is led co experience through the sudden

Intrusion of a highly-delined passage — a lamthar texture, a hall-known object, a dim

recollection of a specific visual sensation — is like the irrational certainty that one encounters

tn dreams, a felling of déa en for which there is no ultimate explanation.

‘Now I think I’ve broken down the image barrier where I’m free to work more’, commented

the artist earlier this year. “Maybe | can start to invent other images, using

ready-mades, which these are starting to do’. He is still in the process of famiharizing

himself with the new idiom, but he envisages countless ways of diversifying and recomplicating

the basic principles, bringing in other kinds of illusion ‘I haven’t got to

the stage yet of colour gradations but it is going to come again | was only at the moment

trying to find a way to apply the paint. | have to become more familiar with it.

| would like eventually a painted surface with perhaps lights in it, but [ have to learn

how to do it properly. When you want to have a sort of Rembrandt background,

you’ve got to learn it, it takes time. So the support background becomes curved, varied,

you play with light on it as they do on television behind announcers, In advertising

this is a standard method of presentation, nevertheless it’s fascinating, and you

can rupture the space, you can build on it, and it satisfies my various whims. I haven’t

got ‘round to going any further with it at the moment, because | haven’t worked all

this out,

Released from the self-imposed limitations of his earlier work, Phillips feels regenerated

and can begin to appreciate once more the possibilities inherent even to aspects

of his paintings which he had regarded as false starts. ‘I’ve always wanted to keep all

the things that I’ve been doing, but I don’t want it to be seuck with that image that |

had. Now [ think I’ve found it and at least for a few years | can carry on consistently,

because it’s open enough and has everything that personally satisfies me in terms of

working. It has a great range of flexibility within it that satisfies my particular whim

ata particular time, from very small pieces up to the very large pieces and the different

nature of work within it. And if | vary it occastonally when | want to freak out

with something more complex, it also works.’ |

Entanglement Series: Perpetual Flax 1981/82, the first of a possible series of large reliefs

for which Phillips has already produced five painted cardboard maquettes, is the

most complex work yet in the new idiom, both in terms of structure and imagery. An

intricately-built assemblage of separate pieces of plywood (cach covered with canvas

on both s id es and heat-pressed) dowelled together, disassembled, painted, and then

reassembled, it bears a superficial resemblance to the painted aluminium reliefs made

by Frank Stella in the late seventies, Although Phillips was aware of Stella’s work, he

had no intention of imitating it, just as he was not concerned in the previous paintings

with allying himself with the New Image artists. Phillips’s celief, like Stella’s, consists

of interpenctrating planes which come out at angles from the surtace, the forms

based on found images and painted. Where Stella, however, has used standard forms

such as french curves which have been enlarged and then decorated with freelybrushed

paint. Phillips has made a series of two-dimensional replicas of three-dimensional

things which he has then reintegrated into a three-dimenstonal object. The

process is quite a different one, and has roots in Phillips’s own work at least as far back

as MULTIPLICATION 1963, with its irregularly-shaped and painted wooden

panel.























125.000,00 CHF



1939: Born in Birmingham on May 21st.



1953-55: Attended Moseley Road Secondary School of Art, Birmingham.



1955-59: Went to Birmingham College of Art: 2 years Intermediate and 2 years N.D.D. (special level course); studied under Gilbert Mason and Fleetwood-Walker.



1959: Summer trip to Paris and to Italy on a scholarship awarded by Birmingham College of Art.



1959-62: Attended the Royal College of Art: his fellow students included David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, Allen Jones, Patrick Caulfield; transferred from Painting School to Television School in the autumn of 1961 but was granted Diploma in Painting in June 1962.



1962-63: Taught at the Conventry College of Art and Birmingham College of Art.



1964: Married Dinah Donald. Designed the entrance hall and large machine for Shakespeare exhibition, for the 400 Centenial exhibition in Stratford-upon-Avon. Awarded Harkness Fellowship for travel to the United States.



1964-66: Lived in New York, travelled around North America by car with Allen Jones in 1965.



1965-66: Formed Hybrid Enterprises with Gerald Lang.



1966: Returned to Europe. Daughter, Tiffany, was born in London.



1967: Divorced wife Dinah.



1968-69: Guest Professor, Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste, Hamburg.



1970: Married Marion-Claude Xylander. Frequent trips throughout the 1970s to Africa, the Far East, and the United States.



1972: Retrospective exhibition at the Westfalischer Kunstverein, Munster.



1976: First one-man show of paintings in England held at the Waddington Galleries, London.



1981: Lived in Zurich. Daughter, Zoe Lana, was born in Zurich. Visit to Australia.



1982-83: Retrospective exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Exhibition travelled to Museum of Modern Art, Oxfard; the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne; the Fruit Market Gallery, Edinburgh; Southampton Art Gallery; and Barbican Art Galery, London.



1983-1986: Frequent trips around Europe especially Mallorca, Spain.



1986: Bought land in Mallorca and began designing and building a finca and with a unique and breathtaking garden.



1987: Galerie Jamileh Weber, Zurich.



1989-93: Exhibits in a variety of galleries around Spain including Barcelona, Valencia, Madrid and Mallorca.



1992-95: Visits to Canada and US for exhibitions in cities including Montreal, Boston, Houston and New York.



1995: Works with Bruce R. Lewin Gallery in New York.



1996: Exhibitions in Mallorca at the Fundacio Miro and Casal Solleric.



1998: ”Freedom of Choices” exhibition in London with Thomas Gibson Gallery.



1996-00: Exhibitions in Valencia with Galeria Punto and in Mallorca with the Centre de Cultura of Sa Nostra. House in Mallorca featured in various magazines for unique design and extraordinary garden.



2002: Retrospective at Galleria Civica di Modena, Italy.



2003: Claude-Marion Phillips paases away on January 30th of Cancer.



2004: Exhibition dedicated to wife, Claude, at Whitford Fine Art; London. “Pop Art UK” group exhibition Galleria Civica di Modena, Italy. Frequent trips to Miami and New York. Spends winter in Austria.



2005: “Metamorphosis” exhibition at Goulanderis Foundation; Andros, Greece. “British Pop” group exhibition at the Museo de Bellas Artes Bilbao, Spain. Traveled to Mexico, Costa Rica and Belize.



2007: Is featured in two documentaries in New Zealand and Israel.



2008: Exhibits with Proarta in Zurich, Switzerland.



2009: Is commissioned to create a painting for the 2010 World Cup.



2010 – 2011: Gallery exhibitions at Galerie Jemileh Weber, Zurich and Galerie Proarta, Zurich. Work exhibited at the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg and The Minneapolis Institute of Arts.



2012: Peter purchased land and began constructing a residence in Costa Rica. Gallery exhibitions at Whitford Fine Art, London and Galerie Proarta, Zurich. Also exhibited at the Museum der bildenden Kunste Leipzig, Germany, Ulster Museum in Belfast, Ireland.



2013: Work is shown at Christie’s “When Britain Went Pop, British Pop Art: The Early Years” and Sotheby’s “The New Situation” both in London. Works are also exhibited in Des Moines Art Center, Iowa, and Centro de Arte Moderna, Lisbon.



2014: Peter is elected Honorary Member of the Royal Birmingham Society of Arts. His work is shown at the Tate Modern and Barbican Centre in London, Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid and featured in China’s Vogue Magazine. He continues to travel and work between Central America, Europe, and Australia.



2015: Peter has a one man show at Galerie Proarta in Zurich and is also shown at the Helmhaus in Zurich. His works are included in the ‘Pop to Popism’ exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Whales.



2016: Sponsored by the National Gallery in Canberra, Peter is awarded a ‘Distinguished Talent Visa’ to permanently reside in Australia. He has a solo exhibition in Sheffield, England.



2017: Peter and his family relocate to the Noosa Hinterland, found in the sunshine coast of Australia. Peter starts work on his new studio and art gallery. His work is shown in exhibitions in Japan, England and the USA.



2018 – Present: Peter’s new art studio and gallery is completed and the doors open for private viewings. The British Council of Russia feature Peter’s work on their website. Peter continues to show in Zurich, London and the USA.





SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS



Albright-Knox, Buffalo, NY



Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago



Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London



The Bernardo Museum, Lisbon



Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Birmingham



British Council, London



Brooklyn Museum, New York



Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon



Duke University, Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC



Gallery Oldham, Oldham UK



Government Art Collection, London



Harvard University, Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA



Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis



Leicestershire County Council Artworks Collection



Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles



The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York



Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis



Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago



Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney



Museum of Fine Arts, Boston



Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York



National Gallery of Australia, Canberra



National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.



National Museum of Art, Osaka



Neue Pinakothek, Munich



Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA



Rhode Island School of Design, RISD Museum, Providence RI



Royal College of Art, London



The Ruth Borchard Collection, London



Tate Modern, London



Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran



Ulster Museum, Belfast



Victoria and Albert Museum, London



Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool



The Whitworth, Manchester







SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS



2020 Peter Phillisp & Gerald Laing, Hybrid 2.0, Levy Gorvy, London



2019 Peter Phillips Not so Random Illusion, 99 Mary Street Gallery, Sheffield



2016 Peter Phillips Works on Paper, 99 Mary Street Gallery, Sheffield



2014 Peter Phillips, Galerie Proarta, Zurich



2012 Art–o-Matic: Pop, Whitford Fine Art, London



2011 Peter Phillips / Stephen Buckley, Galerie Proarta, Zurich



Peter Phillips, Jamileh Weber Gallery, Zurich



2008 Peter Phillips, Galerie Proarta, Zurich



2007 Pop, Pin-Ups & Mosaics, Whitford Fine Art, London



2004 Exhibition dedicated to wife, Marion-Claude Phillips, Whitford Fine Art, London



Peter Phillips: POP 1959-1976, Whitford Fine Art, London



2002 Peter Phillips, Opere 1961 – 2001 Galleria Civica, Modena



2000 Peter Phillips, Private Collection (Graphics 1965-2000), Centre de Cultura Sa Nostra, Palma de Mallorca



1999 Peter Phillips, Galeria Punto, Valencia



1998 Peter Phillips – Freedom of Choices, Thomas Gibson Gallery, London



Peter Phillips – Joan Guaita, Palma de Mallorca



1997 Peter Phillips Retrospective, Casal Solleric, Palma de Mallorca



1996 Fundacio Pilar i Juan Miro, Palma de Mallorca



1995 Gallery Bruce R. Lewin, New York



1993 Peter Phillips – Joan Guaita Art, Palma de Mallorca



1992 Galerie Jamileh Weber, Zurich



1991 Sala Pelaires, Palma de Mallorca



1990 Galeria Punto, FIAC, Valencia



1989 Galeria Manola Vilches, Marbella



Galeria Barcelona, Barcelona



1987 Peter Phillips, Galerie Jamileh Weber, Zurich



1983 RetroVISION, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool



Retrospective, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford



Peter Phillips, Lang Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne



1982 Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh



Southhampton Art Gallery, Southhampton



Barbican Art Gallery, London



Galerie Ziegler, Zurich



1976 Waddington Galleries, London



Tate Gallery, London



1974 Galleria Plura, Milano



Galerie Bischofberger, Zurich



1971 Retrospective, Westfalischer Kunstverein, Munster



Studio d’Arte Condotti, Rome



Galleria Vinciana, Milan



Galerie Dorothea Leonhart, Munich



1970 Galleria Milano, Milan



1969 Studio d’Arte, Condotti, Rome



Galerie Bischofberger, Zurich



Prints Exhibition, Alecto Gallery



Galleria Del Leone, Venice



1968 Prints Exhibition, Alecto Gallery, London



Galleria Del Leone, Venice



Kornblee Gallery, New York



Galerie Bischofberger, Zurich



Galerie Der Spiegel, Cologne



1967 Peter Phillips, Galerie Bischofberger, Zurich



1966 Hybrid, with Gerald Laing, Kornblee Gallery, New York



1965 Peter Phillips, Kornblee Gallery, New York, New York



SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS



2020 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra



2018 Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints: Portraits and States. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York



ZEIGEN. An Audio Tour through the collection of NMAO, The National Museum of Art, Osaka (NMAO) Japan



2017 P is for Pop, The University of Kent, Kent



The Royal Academy of Arts, London



2016 Pop Art Heroes, Whitford Fine Art, London



2015 Das Dreieck Der Liebe, Helmhaus, Zurich



Pop to Popism, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney



2014 The BP Spotlights Series, Tate Modern, London



British Pop Prints, Payne Hurd Gallery, Allentown, Pennsylvania



Pop Art Myths, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid



Pop Art Design, Barbican Centre Art Gallery, London



2013 When Britain went Pop! British Pop Art: The Early Years, Christie’s



Mayfair, London



Under the Sign of Amadeo, a Century or Art, the Centro de Art



Moderna, Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkain, Lisbon



The New Situation; Art in London in the Sixties, Sotheby’s, London



2012 Leben Mit Pop!, Museum der bildenden Kunste Leipzig, Leipzig



The Bellevue Bridge – Collages and Works on Paper, Galerie



Roemerapotheke, Zurich



My Generation: Art of the 60’s and Early 70’s, Ulster Museum,



Belfast



Optical Noise, David Winton Bell Gallery, Providence, Rhode



Island



The Best of Proarta Collection, Galerie Proarta, Zurich,



2011 Optical Effects: 1970s Printed Textiles, The Minneapolis Institute of



Arts, Minneapolis



“S.U.B.H.A.S.T.A. Artistes en el stallers de Miro”, Fundacio Pilar



Joan Miro a Mallorca, Palma de Mallorca



Vibrations, Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa



2010 Highlights of Proarta, Galerie Proarta, Zurich



Mutant Pop, Loyal, Malmo (Sweden)



Press Art, Sammlung Annette und Peter Nobel, Museum der



Moderne, Salzburg



Masterpiece, Offer Waterman & Co, London, United Kingdom



2009 Joan Miro’s printmaking workshops. Editions and Projects of



Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki Centre of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki



A Hartung a Warhol, Centro de Arte Moderna e Contemporanea della Spezia, La Spezia



2008 Crazy Boys, Palazzo Primavera, Terni



Europop, Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich



Modern Prints – Klassiche Moderne bis Pop Art,Galerie Proarta, Zurich



Tom Wesselmann and the 11 Pop Artists Vol 1., Burkhard Fikelmann Com, Dusseldorf



2007 Pop Art! 1956 – 1968, Zuderie del Quiranale, Rome



Geiger meets colleagues, Galerie Geiger, Konstanz



2006 Arbeiten auf Papier, Galerie Michael Haas, Berlin



Art & the 60s from Tate Britain, Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland



2005 Metamorphosis, Goulanderis Foundation, Athens



Fantasia Pop, Il Narciso Galleria d’arte contemoranea, Rome



British Pop, Museo de Bellas Artes Bilbao



2004 Pop Art UK, Galleria Civica di Modena, Modena



Roma, London, Paris, Galleria Il Ponte, Florence



2003 The Pop Art Show, Burkhard Elkelmann Com, Dusseldorf



Verspielt / Playing, Art Forum Ute Barth, Zurich



2002 Zinnebeeldig. 7 symbolen in cultureel erfgoed en hedendaagse



kunst: een confontatie?, Provinciaal Centrum voor Kunst en



Cultuur, Gent



2001 Les Annees Pop, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris



Pop Art. US/UK Connections 1956-1966, The Menil Collection, Houston



Great Britain – The 1960s, Joseph Rickards Gallery, New York



POP ART – Andy Warhol – works on paper, Kunsthandel



Wolfgang Werner, Berlin



1997 Joan Guaita Art, ARCO, Madrid



The Pop ’60′s Transatlantic Crossing, Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon



Pop Art, Sintra Museum of Modern Art, Lisbon



Berardo Collection, Sintra Museum Modern Art, Lisbon



1996 Joan Guaita Art, ARCO, Madrid



Joan Guaita Col-leccio, Havana



Grosse Kunstausstellung, Haus der Kunst, Munich



1995 The Pop Image. Prints and Multiples, Marlborough Graphics, New York



Elvis + Marilyn; 2x immortal, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston, followed in Houston, Charlotte, Cleveland, New York, Tulsa, Ohio, Nashville, San Jose, Honolulu



1994 Out of Print, Musee du Dessin et de l’Estampe, Gravelines



1993 The Sixties Art Scene, Barbican Art Gallery, London



1992 Galeria Afinsa-Almirante, Madrid



Galerie Jamileh Weber, Zurich



Pop Art, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal



Pop Art, Ludwig Museum, Cologne



Pop Art, Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, Madrid



1991 Pop Art Show, Royal Academy of Arts, London



Galeria Punto, FIAC, Paris



Galerie Punto, ARCO, Madrid



Pop Art Prints, Tate Gallery, London



1990 Galeria Punto, FIAC, Paris



Galerie Punto, ARCO, Madrid



Coleccion San Roman de Escalante, Museo de Bellas Artes, Santander



50 propostes pictoriques a Mallorca, Palma de Mallorca



1988 Painters, Royal College of Art, London



Col-leccio Cryns, la Llonja, Palma de Mallorca



Galerie Neuendorf, Frankfurt



Galerie Jamileh Weber, Zurich



Basel Art Fair, Galerie Jamileh Weber, Basel



1987 Sogo Museum of Art, Yokohama



Royal College of Art, London



Basel Art Fair, Galerie Jamileh Weber, Basel



Funabashi Seibu, Funabashi Museum of Art, Japan



Pop Art USA-UK, Odakyu Grand Gallery, Tokyo and Daimaress Museum, Osaka



1986 Capriccio, Palais des Beaux Arts, Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium



Semiha Huber, Eric Franck and Hans Mayer Galleries, Basel Art Fair, Basel



1985 Pop Art 1955-70, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Queensland Art



Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria, Australia



1983 Gloria Laura Gallery, Miami



1981 Avantgarden Retrospektiv: Kunst nach 1945, Wesfalischer Kunstverein, Munster,



1979 Kelpra Studio: Artists’ Prints 1961-1980, Tate Gallery, London



Photography in Printmaking, Victoria and Albert Museum, London



British Drawingssince 1945, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchestar



Sixth British International Print Biennial, Cartwright Hall, Bradford



Images of Ourselves, Tate Gallery, London



1977 International Biennial of Graphic Art, Yugoslavia



Malerei und Photographie in Dialog, Kunsthaus, Zurich



British Painting in the ’60′s, Dundee Museum and Art Gallery



British Painting in the ’60′s, Tate Gallery, London



Paris Biennale Anthologie 1959-67, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris



British Painting 1952-1977, Royal Academy, London



Hayward Annual, Hayward Gallery, London



Fifth British International Print Biennial, Cartwright Hall, Bradford



1976 Pop Art in England: Beginning of a New Figuration 1947-63, Kunstverein, Hamburg



1975 Galleria la Chiocciola, Padua



Galleria L’Imponta, Napoli



1974 British Painting ’74, Hayward Gallery, London



Graveurs anglais contemporains, Musee d’Art d’Histoire des



Estampes, Geneve



1971 Basel Art Fair, Galerie Bischofberger, Basel



Accouragge, Galerie Bischofberger, Zurich



Around the Automobile, Hofstra University, Hamstead, New York,



Critic’s Choice, Arthur Tooth & Sons, London



1970 Art Lending Service, Museum or Modern Art, New York



Internationale Triennale fur Farbige Druckgraphik, Grenchen



L’Estampe en Suisse, Musee des Arts Decoratifs de la Ville de



Lausanne



Dritte Internationale der Zeichnung, Darmstadt



The Spirit of Comics, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of



Pennsylvania, Philadelphia



1969 Recent Prints by Some British Painters and Sculptors, National



Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto



Painting and Sculpture Today, Heron Museum of Art, Indianapolis



Information, Kunsthalle, Basel e Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe



Pop Art, Hayward Gallery, London



1968 British Artists: 6 Painters, 6 Sculptores, The Museum of Modern



Art, New York



Collagen, Kunstgewerbemuseum, Zurich



Grabados de artistas britanicos nuevas tendencias, Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City



Painted in Britain, Macy’s, New York, New York U.S.A. (organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, United Kingdom)



Junge Generation Grossbritannien, Akademie der Kunst, Berlin



The Obsessive Image, Institute of Contemporary Art, London



1967 Recent British Painting – The Peter Stuyvesant Foundation Collection, Tate Gallery, London



Galleria De’Foscherari, Bologna



Jeunes Peintres Anglais, Palais de Beaux-Arts, Bruxelles



Contemporary British Painting, Wilmington



British Drawings: The New Generation, organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York



Junge EnglischeKunst, Kunsthalle, Bern



Le visage de l’homme dans l’art contemporain, Musee Rath, Geneve



Homage to Marilyn Monroe, Sidney Janis Gallery, New York



Pop Prints, Arts Council of Great Britain, London



Englische Kunst, Galerie Bischofberger, Zurich



1966 Pop and Op, The American Federation of Arts, New York



Galerie Bischofberger, Zurich



Galerie Neuendorf, Hamburg



Galerie M.E. Thelan, Essen



Irish Exhibition of Living Art 1966, Gallery of the National College of Arts, Dublin



A New Look in Prints, Museum of Modern Art, New York



Artists for Core, Grippi and Waddell Gallery, New York



British Painting, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels



The Other Tradition, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia



Recent Paitings, Drawings and Sculpture 1958-1966 by the Harkness Fellows, The Leicester Galleries, London



Primary Structures, Jewish Museum, New York



11 Pop Artists: The New Image, Galerie Friederich & Dahlem, Munich



1965 ICA Prints, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London



Peter Stuyvesant – A Collection in the Making, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London



Op and Pop, Moderna Museet, Stockholm



La Figuration narrative dans l’art contemporain, Galerie Creuze, Paris



Jeune peinture anglaise: Pop-Art, Op-Art et autre tendances,Galerie Motte, Geneve



Pop Art, Nouveau Realisme etc, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels



1964 Neue Realisten & Pop Art, Akademie der Kunste, Berlin



Figuratie/Defiguratie De Menselijke Figur Sedert Picasso, Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Gent



Rule Briannia, Feigen/Palmer Gallery, Los Angeles



Premio Marzotto, Roma, Baden-Baden, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, London



Nieuwe Realisten, Gemeentemuseum, den Haag



Pick of the Pops, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff



Contemporary British Painting and Sculpture, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo



Pop etc, Museum des 20 Jahrhunderts, Vienna



The New Image, Arts Council Gallery, Belfast



Britische Malerei der Gegenwart, Kunstverein fur die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Munich



The New Generation: 1964, Whitechapel Gallery, London



Colour, Form and Texture, Arthur Tooth & Sons, London



British Paintings from the Paris Biennale 1963, Royal College of Art, London



Troisieme Biennale des Jeunes, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris



1963 British Painting in the Sixties, Whitechapel Gallery, London



Pop Art, Midland GroupGallery, Nottingham



Toward Art? Arts Council of Great Britain, London



1962 One Year of British Art selected by Edward Lucie-Smith, Arthur Tooth & Sons, London



British Art Today, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara



British Art Today, Dallas Museum of Contemporary Art, Dallas



1962 British Art Today, San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco



Towards Art? An exhibition showing the contribution which the College made to the Fine Arts 1952-62, Royal College of Art, London



International Exhibition of the New Realists, Sidney Janis Gallery, New York



Four Young Artists, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London



British Painting, American Embassy, London



British Painting and Sculpture Today and Yesterday, Arthur Tooth & Sons, London



Image in Progress, Grabowski Gallery, London



Young Contemporaries, RBA Galleries, London



1961 John Moores Liverpool Exhibition 3, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool



Young Contemporaries, RBA Galleries, London



1960 Young Contemporaries, RBA Galleries, London



1958 Young Contemporaries, RBA Galleries, London