Richard Phillips, Lip Biter, 1999
RICHARD PHILLIPS, Lip Biter, 1999
Edition of 50 + 1 AP
Numbered
Accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity
Hand knotted
Wool & Silk
High / Low Cut
Richard Phillips is known for paintings that deliberately blur the boundaries between advertising, fashion imagery, pornography, and the rhetoric of high art, examining their entangled roles within contemporary visual culture. Since the early 1990s, he has advanced a practice grounded in the appropriation of found imagery, extending the critical legacy of Pop Art while heightening its psychological and formal tensions through meticulous painterly execution.
Phillips’s work addresses the marketability of the body and the construction of desire, exploring how identity, sexuality, aspiration, and power are mediated through images designed for circulation and consumption. Translating his selected source material into drawing and painting, he emphasizes the iconic force of the image itself—its ability to seduce, confront, and persist within collective consciousness. His portraits, particularly of women, have drawn sustained attention for their hyperreal precision, achieved through controlled brushwork, glazing, and an acute focus on surface and detail. As the artist has noted, “My pictures involve a kind of wasted beauty—that’s always been a thread in my work.”
For HENZEL STUDIO, Phillips reappropriated his painting Lip Biter, translating its charged visual language into a hand-knotted textile. Through variations in pile height and the interplay of wool and silk, the work renders painterly nuance and tonal shifts as tactile structure, extending the tension between allure and critique into material form.
Phillips’s work is included in major institutional collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; and Tate Modern, London.
Select exhibitions: Le Consortium, Dijon; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Dallas Contemporary, Dallas and Gagosian, New York.
Image: (1) Lip Biter, 1999 (2) Lip Biter, 1999 (in-situ)
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