Richard Phillips

When we can’t determine what art is—when we get to that point where we’re not sure, that’s the strongest likelihood that we’re actually experiencing something great. That’s what the art world is most afraid of, because we don’t know how to assign value, whether it’s cultural or otherwise. In a way the films were meant to be a destabilizing artwork. They exist in another area, a zone where we were free to work.
—Richard Phillips

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Richard Phillips.

For Phillips, critique is as much an intrinsic material in the conception and staging of his work as the materials of their making. His conflating of subject and genre continues to provide challenging comment on the condition and reach of contemporary art.

Phillips has embarked on a new phase of work that hinges on the self-awareness of real-life subjects. Lindsay Lohan (2011) and Sasha Grey (2011), his first two films, made their debut at the “Commercial Break” film project at the 2011 Biennale di Venezia. In these "motion portraits ", the notorious actresses pose erotically—Grey in a modernist John Lautner home, and Lohan in an aquamarine infinity pool. Both actresses project self-conscious recognition in their performances and in turn point toward the transformative potential of narrative action, framed by their compelling beauty. Phillips’s third film, First Point (2012) marks his second collaboration with Lohan and third collaboration with legendary surf filmmaker Taylor Steele. A contemporary film noir, First Point juxtaposes haunting nocturnal imagery with surf sequences in which female pro-surfer Kassia Meador (Lohan's acknowledged stunt double) and Lohan herself appear.