Studio One Noosa
Art 8 - Peter Phillips
Art 8 - Peter Phillips
Couldn't load pickup availability
In Claude’s Memory
Estimated Value Price - $6000 - $6200
Signed Artist Proof Giclée Print on Canvas
176 x 129.5 cm
Peter Phillips 'Pop Art emerged in many different forms on both sides of the Atlantic even before the term gained currency in around 1961-2 to describe an art movement rooted in popular culture, referencing the artefacts of everyday life, mimicking the look and processes of photography, advertising, packaging, cinema and television. Some of the artists most closely associated with Pop, and partly credited with its invention, such as the American Tom Wesselmann and Peter Phillips’s fellow students David Hockney and R. B. Kitaj, steadfastly resisted or rejected the label. What is indisputable, however, is that in 1960 Phillips, aged just 21, produced some of the first and grandest Pop paintings in the world and in doing so secured himself a permanent place in the history of this watershed moment in the development of 20th-century art.'
I’m also attaching the catalogue created for Peter’s 80th birthday with writing’s from Marco Livingstone. Here is the excerpt that speaks to this style of works my dad did:
"Collage has always been Phillips’s natural medium, both as an end in itself and as a structuring principle for his paintings, from as far back as the early Pop paintings that he produced at the start of the 1960s when he was a student at the Royal College of Art. The collages that he began to make in the mid-1990s as independent works and as studies to be conscientiously replicate in oil paintings on canvas, hark back to those groundbreaking works and to their systems of geometric compartmentalisation and pleasing asymmetries.
Again interspersing geometric shapes and decorative patterns with machine parts, reproductions of art works and images of people and animals, Phillips draws us into his layered spaces, at times literally putting us through hoops. In the process he leads the viewer on visual journeys that propose unexpected equivalences between high art and scientific illustration, overheated human sexuality and the natural landscape, the allure of abstract coloured shapes and the harnessing of meticulous brushmarks to the creation of a quasi-photographic representation.
Presented as a series of paintings within paintings, these works have a somewhat phantasmagoric quality, heightened by the highly detailed application of the oil paint with fine brushes. Yet the carefully judged network of underlying rectangular shapes that abut each other succeeds in calming what might otherwise have produced a manic atmosphere. The motifs bounce off each other like the silver balls in the amusement arcade pinball machines that Phillips had enjoyed as a teenager and in his early twenties, but the intimations of frenetic movement are held in check by the inescapable sense that every action has been frozen in time and locked forever into place. Rich in visual sensation but with a compositional structure that with a touching modesty pays homage to the home comforts of patchwork quilts, these are among Phillips’s most contemplative works, constantly regenerating themselves under the viewer’s gaze."
Share
