Richard Phillips' First Solo US Museum Exhibition Set for Dallas Contemporary, 4/11-8/10

Dallas Contemporary announces "Negation of the Universe," an exhibition of work by Richard Phillips (American, b. 1962), on view from April 11 - August 10, 2014. Phillips' first solo museum exhibition in the United States, "Negation of the Universe" surveys his work of the past two decades and encompasses over 40 paintings, sculptures and films. The exhibition offers a unique opportunity to experience the full scope of his exploration into political and social identity; consumerism; eroticized desire; and social constraints through multiple media in a single space.

Critique is as intrinsic to Phillips' works as the tangible media used to create them. His conflating of subject and genre continues to provide challenging commentary on the condition and reach of contemporary art. In a style that both embraces and challenges tradition, Phillips engages a complex web of human obsessions-sexuality, politics, power, death-that are continuously exploited throughout popular media. With subjects ranging from George W. Bush to actresses such as Dakota Fanning and Sasha Gray, he questions the foundation of high art by injecting it with popular culture.

The exhibition includes early paintings from Phillips' 1997 exhibition at Turner & Runyon Gallery in Dallas, including Mask, which depicts a towel-wrapped woman covered in cold cream. First Point, which portrays actress Lindsay Lohan, is presented alongside Phillips' short film from which the painted image derives. Playboy Marfa, a three-part installation comprising a blacked-out Dodge Charger, a concrete plinth, and a neon bunny icon, was first shown on site in Marfa, Texas in 2013 and has been re-installed here.

"Dallas Contemporary is thrilled to be organizing Richard Phillips' first museum exhibition in the United States," said Dallas Contemporary Director Peter Doroshenko. "Since the early 1990s, Phillips has challenged the formal structures of painting, pushing the boundaries like no other artist. I am thrilled Dallas Contemporary is hosting this major exhibition with such an important artist and popular culture provocateur."

Born in Massachusetts in 1962, Richard Phillips lives and works in New York. His work investigates the marketability of man: his wishes, ideas, actions, identity, sexuality, politics, and desires. Phillips translates T.V. and tabloid subjects into drawings and paintings that are executed through a traditional, meticulous process, creating lush, ultraprecise artworks from familiar media imagery and questioning popular values and assumptions about art in the process.

Phillips has exhibited in many individual and group exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe, including important survey exhibitions at Le Consortium, Dijon (2004); Kunstverein Hamburg (2002); and Kunsthalle Zurich (2000). He is represented in public and private collections including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; UBS Paine Webber Art Collection, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Recently Phillips has begun to explore filmmaking and photography as a means of moving beyond the found imagery of his paintings. His photography has appeared in Elle and Lotus, and will be featured in upcoming issues of Vogue China and Visionaire. He completed his first film, Lindsay Lohan, in 2011. Phillips considers the film a "motion portrait" of the actress that "at once reveals an emotional awareness of her recent past and, in the most positive terms, expressed the limitless creative potential of her art joined with her unparalleled beauty." The film premiered at the 2011 Venice Biennale in tandem with his second film, Sasha Grey. His third film premiered at Art Basel's Art Unlimited exhibition in June 2012. All three films were shown for the first time in the United States, together with a group of related paintings at Gagosian New York in September of 2012.