Lot 217: RICHARD PHILLIPS

The Bourgeoisie
Signed and dated "Richard Phillips 2001" on the reverse.

108 x 85 5/8 in. (274.3 x 217.5 cm)

Oil on linen.

2001

New York, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, <em>Richard Phillips: America</em>, September 8 - October 6, 2001

Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York
Michael and Eleonore Stoffel Collection, Cologne

&#8220;Rather than opposing my work to Pop Art, I have seen it more as an extension of the consequences of it. I suppose that would classify it as a second-order experience. The combination of the traditional, European academic painting (techniques of which were rejected by Pop artists in favor of imitating industrial and commercial methods) with images that were often retrieved from magazines of the original Pop era sets up a collision of formal and critical strategies. This disables linear thought and meaning in favor of the possibility of shifting contradiction. If Pop Art sought to be the blank mirror of capitalist &#8216;I want to be a machine&#8217; realism, then my work seeks to break that mirror and eradicate the control of these static agendas. There is, in fact, humanity behind this emptiness, and it is not the humanity that would be dictated to us through cynicism and irony. Representation in my painting is not only the means to unleash this potential, but it is an inseparable subject of it as well. Misreading prejudices, hypocrisy, contradiction, duplicity, and fraud are as one with love, charity, hope, and temperance. It is not a detached, critical relationship that I wish to establish with my paintings, nor are they demonstrations of morally acceptable theory,&#8221;
R. Phillips, taken from Kunstverein in Hamburg, ed., Richard Phillips, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2002, p. 101