Peter Phillips, a distinguished determine in British Pop artwork, has died at 86. His household confirmed his loss of life in an internet assertion, saying that the artist handed away on June twenty third. The household additionally indicated {that a} celebration of the artist’s life can be held in August at his gallery in Noosa, Australia.
Born in Birmingham, England, in 1939, Phillips studied on the Royal School of Artwork in London, the place his contemporaries included David Hockney, Allen Jones, and R.B. Kitaj. Like their counterparts in the USA, these British pop artists challenged conventions of postwar artwork by embracing mass tradition and industrial aesthetics.
Phillips’s work borrowed imagery from promoting and industrial design to create brilliant, saturated compositions, characterised by their frenetic types and collage-like aesthetic. In Spectrocoupling (1972), he approximated the power {of electrical} currents by haphazard geometric types, whereas works like Glamour Ladies (1974) layered brilliant pin-up imagery into grid-like formations. Different works grappling with Americana and popular culture featured portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Bridgette Bardot, as seen most prominently in For Males Solely—Starring MM and BB (1961).
Phillips rose to prominence within the Nineteen Sixties, and was featured in a BBC documentary titled Pop Goes the Easel alongside Peter Blake and Pauline Boty in 1962. His fame was bolstered by his inclusion in worldwide exhibitions, together with the Paris Biennale in 1963 and “Nieuwe Realisten” on the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague the next yr. In 1964, Phillips moved to New York, the place he exhibited alongside Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist.
A Phillips retrospective was held in 2002 on the Galleria Civica di Modena in Italy. The following yr, the artist’s 1961 portray Battle/Sport—a geometrical composition that includes a hand holding a gun as much as a mirror—was tailored for the duvet of Room on Hearth, the second album by American rock band the Strokes. In 2015, Phillips relocated to Australia, establishing a studio and gallery in Noosa.
Of their assertion, the household introduced plans to launch the Peter Phillips Basis, which is able to supply grants and residencies for rising artists. A GoFundMe marketing campaign has been established to help the initiative.
