Richard Phillips: Best Picture: On view now at Serge Sorokko Gallery, 1301 First Street, Napa

Richard Phillips was born in Marblehead, Massachusetts. He earned a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art in 1984 and an MFA from Yale School of Art in 1986. He lives and works in New York.

Phillips returned to painting in the early 1990s after a period making sculpture. His work as an art handler at the Guggenheim Museum deepened his understanding of a painting’s physical presence. “I was handling all these Rothkos and Pollocks, and I came to understand what the scale of an American painting could be,” he recalled in an interview with Michael Slenske for Architectural Digest in 2014.

With Mask (1995), his first large-scale portrait, Phillips applied this sense of scale to a found image. Its source was a 1970s illustration of a woman wearing a cold-cream mask, discovered in a book about life after divorce. Enlarging the image gave it an imposing physical presence. This approach continued in his paintings of fashion models: familiar commercial imagery became the subject of large, meticulously painted canvases.

Edward Thorp Gallery presented thirteen of his paintings in 1996, based on images from discarded fashion and stock-photography magazines. The Whitney Museum selected Alien and Peel for the 1997 Biennial, and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center included him in Greater New York in 2000.

Phillips works from photographs drawn from magazines, advertising, political news, and celebrity publicity, as well as images from his own films. A grid guides the transfer of the source image into a drawing, establishing its proportions before he develops the face in charcoal and chalk. His paintings often develop from such studies. On prepared linen, he uses a pencil grid and monochrome underpainting before applying layers of oil color. He also exhibits drawings as finished works in their own right. His subjects have included George W. Bush, Joschka Fischer, Deepak Chopra, and Demi Moore, alongside models, musicians, and other actors.

Solo exhibitions followed at Kunsthalle Zürich (2000), Kunstverein in Hamburg (2002), and Le Consortium, Dijon (2004). His work was also shown at Deichtorhallen Hamburg in 2002. The Swiss art journal Parkett featured Phillips in volume 71 in 2004, with essays by Jutta Koether and Christian Rattemeyer and a conversation with Diedrich Diederichsen.

Swiss Institute, New York, placed Phillips’s paintings after Adolf Dietrich alongside Dietrich’s originals in Adolf Dietrich and Richard Phillips: Painting and Misappropriation (2010). Gagosian, White Cube, Friedrich Petzel, and Galerie Max Hetzler have also presented solo exhibitions of Phillips’s work.

Filmmaking gave Phillips a direct role in creating the images that would become his paintings. Working with filmmaker Taylor Steele, he made Lindsay Lohan and Sasha Grey in 2011, followed by First Point, his second film with Lohan, in 2012. Selected images from the three films became a body of large-scale paintings of Lohan and Grey. The paintings retain the films’ poses, lighting, and architectural and coastal settings. Gagosian’s New York exhibition in September 2012 presented all three films alongside paintings developed from their imagery.

Dallas Contemporary organized Negation of the Universe in 2014, Phillips’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States and a survey of nearly two decades of work.

His work is held in collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Denver Art Museum, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.