Richard Phillips: Best Picture

2024 Nominees, 2024

Serge Sorokko Gallery is pleased to present the complete series of twelve original drawings from Richard Phillips’s 2024 Nominees, created for TheWrapBook: The Art of Cinema 2024. First published as a folio titled 2024 Nominees, this presentation marks the U.S. premiere of the complete series of twelve original drawings.

Phillips returns to a subject he first examined in his 2011 exhibition Most Wanted: the carefully managed image of the celebrity before the press. Working from publicity photographs, he selects expressions that depart from the familiar red-carpet pose and suggest something less rehearsed. Charcoal, chalk, and pastel slow images made for rapid circulation, bringing the labor of drawing—and the individual presence of each subject—back into view.

The portraits are presented in six film pairings: Oppenheimer, Barbie, Maestro, Killers of the Flower Moon, Priscilla, and Past Lives. Each actor appears in two registers—as a performer on screen, and as a public figure performing for the camera. Best Picture names both cinema’s highest honor and the unstable process of choosing one image to stand in for a person.