"At its core, this show is the conflict between capitalism, fascism, and communism. It looks into the nature of representation, propaganda, and misinformation, and how they redirect the ideologies of institutions."
—Richard Phillips
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present "NEW MUSEUM," a series of nine monumental paintings by Richard Phillips.
Over the last decade, Phillips has developed a striking signature style that derives its tension from his selective use of popular images that he subjects to the technical, value-laden refinements of academic painting. For Phillips, critique is as much an intrinsic material in the conception and staging of his paintings as the canvas and paint with which they are made. His deft and selective scrambling and conflating of subject and genre continues to provide challenging comment on the condition and reach of painting in our time. As a self-conscious American painter weaned on postmodern appropriation strategies, Phillips is an active protagonist in the continually evolving discourse on the many lives and deaths of painting and how this interacts, throughout history, with the complex politics of making and reading images.
"NEW MUSEUM" construes painting as an act of civil disobedience rather than one of benign compliance with existing aesthetic conventions. Phillips's term for this is "paintertainment". The title of the exhibition derives from a photograph from a 1973 issue of Hustler magazine of two men slouching against a wall on the Bowery in New York (now the location of the New Museum of Contemporary Art). By appropriating this image and rendering it as a large and detailed oil painting, Phillips alludes to how, in his view, institutions such as the New Museum employ propaganda to promote their agendas, at the same time as he challenges the status of these institutions as vehicles of cultural authority.
