Peter Phillips, one of earliest proponents of Pop art in the UK, has died.
The artist trained at the Royal College of Art with contemporaries David Hockney, Allen Jones and R.B. Kitaj, and likewise incorporated motifs of mass entertainment and consumer culture into his layered collagelike paintings. In For Men Only Starring MM and BB (1961), painted on wood and over two metres in height, images of Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot are mixed with other pin-up models in lingerie, as well as more abstract symbols including stars and crosses. A giant logolike hare bounds across the canvas; the symbol, like all the others featured, was copied from magazines and advertising.
In 1963 Phillips showed at the Paris Biennale and the following year he was part of Nieuwe Realisten at Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, an era-defining exhibition that travelled to Vienna and Berlin. That year Phillips, on a fellowship, travelled to the source of the style, New York, staying for two years and showing with the likes of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist.
Phillips continued to exhibit throughout the decades with a solo show at Waddington Galleries in London in 1976, followed by a travelling retrospective that opened at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool in 1983, moving to the Museum of Modern Art, Oxfard; the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne; the Fruitmarket, Edinburgh; Southampton Art Gallery; and the Barbican Art Gallery, London.
The 1990s saw Phillips’s work become looser, incorporating shades of Neo-expressionism: a series of oil and collages in paper and wood featured images of machine elements, from bolts to springs and chains, floated in a more abstract space.
In 2002 at the Galleria Civica di Modena, Italy, and a new generation was introduced to the artist’s work with his painting War/Game (1961) used as the artwork to Room on Fire, the second album by US rock bank The Strokes: a geometric composition, the painting includes a hand holding a gun up to a mirror.
