Richard Phillips

Richard Phillips makes fairly realistic oil paintings of imagery borrowed from pornographic magazines, fashion rags, contemporary artworks, newspapers, and other common visual media. Bold, heavy, and unabashedly lacking in subtlety, Phillips’s paintings splash nudie shots of spread-eagled women, head shots of fashion models in bizarre sunglasses and headgear, kitschy furballs of kitten cuteness, and details of art pieces like Jeff Koons’s Michael Jackson (sans Bubbles) sculpture across gargantuan canvases, inevitably stunning the viewer for the time it takes to absorb such a wide swath of appropriated appropriation. Exceptional works include a spurting crotch shot entitled Negation of the Universe as a riff on Courbet’s Origin of the World, and a horizontal portrait of President George Bush, bordered on either side by thick panels of hot pink, creating a brash new flag for the United States that is strangely reminiscent of Canada’s.