Richard Phillips American, b. 1962

Known for his large-scale photorealistic paintings, Richard Phillips’s work evokes the aesthetic of fashion magazines and often features close-up portraits of women sourced from seductive print spreads. Phillips creates hyperrealistic paintings that meditate on mainstream media’s obsession with sex, death, and power. He renders pop-culture celebrities in an academic manner, blurring the line between tabloid imagery and fine art, and between “low” and “high” culture.

 

Phillips works with a combination of oil paint and wax emulsion that uncannily imitates the surface of the printed page, resulting in images often described as hyperreal. More recently, he has ventured into filmmaking, as evidenced by his 2011 video First Point, which he describes as a “motion image” of Lindsay Lohan sunbathing and walking on the beach.

 

Phillips’s work is held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; and the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, among others. He lives and works in New York, NY.