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Bodybuilder & Sportsman Gallery presents an exhibition
of new oil on canvas and wax on panel paintings by Chicago-based
artist John Phillips. Known for his intensely colored
work investigating issues of perception and the figure/ground
dilemma, Phillips's new work moves beyond his abstracted
and trademark ribbons to forms that continue to challenge
the serious issues of the painting tradition and are
even more colloquial.
Slang--a kind of language occurring chiefly in casual
and playful speech, made up typically of short-lived
coinages and figures of speech that are deliberately
used in place of standard terms for added raciness,
humor, irreverence, or other effect. ‹The American Heritage
Dictionary
It's a pretty hilarious notion to imagine anyone would
ever make the pronouncement "painting is dead." The
remark is so sober its profundity could only ever be
rendered false. This truth was made clear quite recently
when Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, claimed
irony to be dead after the events of September 11, only
to back peddle a few weeks later after the thoughtful
response to the tragedies by the satirical newspaper,
The Onion, gave the public permission to temper its
grief with humor.
Certainly painting as a fine-art genre carries with
it the heavy burden of art history, and it is the contemporary
painter's task to make his or her practice relevant
to the current moment. It's a perplexing project for
the artist in the face of contemporary culture's penchant
for levity and litheness. Through the course of his
career, Chicago painter John Phillips has tackled this
project employing the vocabulary of minimalism, abstraction,
and color-field painting to create objects that resonate
within the complexity of his chosen medium yet evince
the ethereal, intellectual, and irreverent concerns
of new art.
Phillips's attitude is most aptly found is his abstracted
representations, most often, in the past, seen as banners
and ribbons. In his new body of work, the forms in the
compositions come across as even goofier than the vacuous
ribbons--fat, awkward conduits of color that dare the
viewer to find the sobriety of the painter's practice.
It's here that Phillips's accomplishments as a practitioner
of a time-honored tradition come forward as the viewer
becomes transfixed by the object and its authenticity
becomes ever more clear. This is painting that is seriously
cool.
John Phillips received his an MFA in 1979 from the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was a Whitney
Fellow in 1978. He has had solo exhibitions at I-Space,
N.A.M.E., Dart Gallery and Marianne Deson Gallery in
Chicago. Phillips's work has also been seen in numerous
group shows including "Art in Chicago, 19451995" at
the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, "In Full Effect"
at White Columns, New York, and "Critical Perspectives"
at P.S. 1 in New York. Phillips is a recipient of a
National Endowment for the Arts, Visual Artist Fellowship,
in Painting, and two Illinois Arts Council grants.
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