John Phillips

John Phillips

John Phillips

Of course JP is in my top 10
I told him once that he was my favorite painter, he was a little down that day as I remember but I really meant it all the same. I should tell him again.

John Phillips Review in Art Forum

John Phillips at Tony Wight Gallery, Artforum, Summer 2008

The coupling of clear form with an at times confused figure-ground relationship is a hallmark of John Phillips' oils. In this recent exhibition of nine new works, the artist's newly introduced battle was between cranked-up color and striations of gray, with the latter poised to triumph at every turn. Phillips' precise positioning of circles, ovals, and stripes suggests the use of a computer to sketch out pattern and color prior to painting. Still, the edges of forms, while clean and purposely plotted, are hardly perfect, their wavering lines exposing a comfort with the unaided hand's limitations.

The best works in the show have a vibrant visuality. They are crafted with thick paint that keeps the eye moving from oval to ground to oval, seeking respite in canvases never quite large enough to allow for it. The color is artificial and opaque, parsed out in hand-plotted compositions that discard the claustrophobia of Op art. The buzz is there, but not the paranoia. In the best moments--the synchopated pinks of Fats Domingo, 2007, the tight rhythmic bars of Hey Joe (Albers), 2007, or the powder-blue ground and gray martini olives of Untitled, 2008--the hand serves to moderate slickness with crooked geometry.



Despite their visual pop, the attitude of these paintings is wry and dry, reflecting a long-rehearsed deadpan stance crucial to this particular stand-up routine's success. One might characterize the works as formalist Borscht-Belt abstractions. This is most readily seen in Untitled (Puppy), 2006, a large painting in which the elegant ovals coalesce into a cartoonish dog face. But despite the self-deprecating humor that lurks in the orbit of the shapes, these painting have serious origins, combining the languages of various geometritic painting styles with specific reverence to John McLaughlin canvases and early Ellsworth Kelly collages. Occasionally, hints of midcentury interior decor or an ornamental motif are also detectable, recalling the interplay between abstraction and decoration rife in early modernism.




Using an artist's personal obsessions as a point of entry into their work can be a disastrous critical strategy, but Phillips' dedication to music, particularly jump blues, garage rock, and early punk, are regularly alluded to in his work's titles--My Daddy Drives a UFO, 2008, for example, borrows a lyric from the 1970's punk band the Cramps. These music styles share an affinity for quick tempos, earthy lyrics, and simple riffs executed with abandon. They are all rough-hewn and histrionic, pared-down and fast-paced. One couldn't ask for a better summary of Phillips' practice.

Anthony Elms

John Phillips Review in Art Papers

John Phillips, Chicago, Art Papers, 2008

I first met John Phillips in 1980, soon after his graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was installing large abstract paintings in a group show at N.A.M.E. Gallery, which was then on Hubbard Street -- a great incubator for young artists whose energy and cultivated unorthodoxy became evident in self-curated loft exhibitions like the 1981 Black Light Planet Picasso, which coupled rock & roll revisionism with the return to painting. These were but two of a number of generational ventures by independent painters, which were followed by a half dozen new galleries just north of the Loop. New alternative space also emerged -- like Randolph Street Gallery -- to help redefine the city's artworld tag.

During that time, N.A.M.E. members organized a show of works by four painters. Here, Humbert's Dilemma, Phillips' provocatively titled, fauz-heroic black, pink, and white geometric canvas -- think Good-N-Plenty -- was the most memorable. The work was so huge that only N.A.M.E.'s groundfloor, double-door back alley exit on Hubbard could accommodate it. I recall Phillips teetering on a twelve-foot stepladder as he extolled the virtues and pitfalls of early R&B and pluralist painting strategies. He was a well-known club DJ and remains conversant in both the obscure influences of postwar Black music forms and the language of abstraction. For thirty years, he's been reconstructing the mythologies of both genres and laying playful jabs at them in his meticulous and sometimes perversely arranged compositions.




He has wrestled what he once gleaned from artists such as the young Barnett Newman, Frank Stella, and Larry Poons, into destabilizing reflections on formal abstraction and painting in general. in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Phillips' work was more fluid and lyrical. Color and line trumped his earlier hard edges and assertive planes. Then, and until 2000, billowing ribbon forms animated his canvases, producing patterns and a pictorialism that he had earlier avoided. But his obsession with color and composition remained. Humorous tubular shapes and soft mechanical forms skewed formal logic, suspending his sophisticated color in a stew of ornamental scrawls and effortless-looking improvisation.

At Tony Wight Gallery, Phillips' exhibition of nine new paintings further establishes his quirky musical and post-formalist roots [February 29-April 12, 2008]. Here, ellipses and grayness are more pervasive. Some of the paintings improvise on a geometric pattern and a simple gray scale. Dots or ellipses shift from light to dark across a gradient ground that turn in the opposite direction, deflecting our normal spatial reading. In Jill, awkward deflated oval shapes float on a semblance of a television test pattern, circa 1950. In the large gray painting My Daddy Drives a
UFO, two arching trails of elliptical rings fly in formation across a gloomy furrowed sky.





The stunning Fats Domingo features hot pink discs and circles that, spilling from the top of a gray field, balloon as they descend to the bottom -- as if they were expelled from a large Lava lamp. The radiant yellow Untitled (Puppy) is my favorite, it's also Phillips' best shot at pulling the rug out from anyone looking to decode his elaborate bargains with form and language. Here, a large white donut shape is tacked to a central, flat, black cartoon eye socket. To the right is a white "Little Orphan Annie" aperture. A squat caramel-colored nose makes up the rest of the image, and a simple black hole for a mouth gapes to see Max Fleischer's crow quill pen aimed right at him.



Philips' work is a hybrid of art historical and populist impulses. Muscular and witty, it plays with anecdotal details of the descent of the modernist canon and the rise of America's anti-intellectualism in the arts. But he distances himself from the popular indifference to the question of artistic genealogies by probing the formal rigors and conceptual pleasures of paint while grounding his inquiry in things that are incredibly fun to look at and ponder.

Paul Krainak

John Phillips

This photo better be in his review. or one of his paintings at least.

John Phillips

This Friday, Feb. 29th
5 to 8 pm

Tony Wight Gallery
119 N. Peoria
Chicago IL

(formerly Bodybuilder & Sportsman)

TONY WIGHT GALLERY is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Chicago-based artist John Phillips. In his first exhibition with the gallery since 2002, Phillips continues to manipulate painting language in eight new works. Generated from “system based doodles” the paintings are alternately executed in high-keyed colors or resolute shades of gray. Phillips considers the visual event within any single painting as much as the relationships between paintings. Numerous instances of similarity and difference occur throughout the work, and designations of figure and ground continually slip between clarity and obfuscation as arrangements of ovoid shapes hover upon graphic backdrops of color and striation. Attention to surface presence is equally integral to the delivery of these paintings. Knifed over expanses of oil paint are bound by crisply delineated edges and optical patterns that exude a playful, considered attitude about image making. Accordingly, Phillips’ work asserts a conceptual authority that is simultaneously serious and dead-pan. Titles may refer to immediate visual associations (as in Untitled (Puppy), 2006) as often as they pun on combined cultural references from art and music (as in Hey Joe (Albers), 2007). A long-standing theme in Phillips’ work, these new paintings instigate a conversation with the viewer about perception, pleasure, and ultimately, the boundaries of visual language.

JOHN PHILLIPS (American, b. 1953) has exhibited widely nationally and internationally. Selected solo exhibitions include New Paintings at Galerie Kusseneers (2006, Antwerp, Belgium); Scroll Paintings:1988-1998 at Tree Studios (2006, Chicago, IL); and Hot Mix: 1979-2004 at Columbia College (2004, Chicago, IL). Recent group exhibitions include Material Matter at Sideshow (2007, Brooklyn, NY); and Eloquent Papers at Galerie Kusseneers (2007, Antwerp, Belgium). Phillips has received a McCormick Place commission, National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council grants, and a Whitney Fellowship. His work is included in the collections of The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The City of Chicago, and The Rockford Art Museum (Rockford, IL). He lives and works in Chicago.

John Phillips

John Phillips

Newer than these, JP tells me that he will have 7 all new paintings in this show. I'll repost an image and info about the opening next month. There will also be an installation by Ken Fandell, check his site's link on the left side.





New Paintings

Feb 29 - Apr 12, 2008

at

Bodybuilder and Sportsman
119 N. Peoria St. #2C
Chicago, IL 60607
Wed-Sat, 11-5 P.M.

Jo Hormuth and John Phillips

Grand Valley State University
Grand Rapids, Michigan

Thursday, October 4 – Friday, November 2, 2007

Opening Reception: Thursday, October 4, 2007

Jo Hormuth and John Phillips met on the phone during the summer of 1983.
They have lived and worked together ever since.
John is a painter.
Jo works with everything else.
This is their first exhibition together...


Open to the Public




Jo Hormuth

Jo’s work swings between the coolly elegant and the flat out funny, enlisting
a diversity of means and media while employing simple conceptual strategies
to decidedly poetic ends. She transforms “the familiar” to create situations
that become springboards for the viewer to consider many relationships,
contradictions and possibilities. Concepts of repetition, similarity, and
difference are directly engaged as well as scale changes, unlikely materials,
use and context. Humor is embraced—and she believes, as Man Ray did,
that it is the best communicator. Formalism is undermined by subjective
content and apparent contradictions abound in the work in terms of materials
or presentation. According to Joanna Drucker: “the object is in direct but
complementary contradiction to its thingness.” Jo aims to work the gap
where life and culture overlap.
website:
http://www.johormuth.com

John Phillips

John works abstract painting’s middle ground by mixing a high-minded
seriousness and deadpan humor—a tug-of-war between intelligence and indulgence.
He once remarked that “if Barnett Newman had had a lava lamp, it might look like
my paintings.” Think Disney channeling Mondrian. To quote Ann Wiens, “These
complex abstractions employ a battery of mod shapes and startling colors that flipflop
against one another, laying out the essential elements of abstract painting—
form, color, space, balance—in a decidedly hip artistic slang.” The work confronts
the viewer with a visual event that dwells upon its narrative structure, implying
and denying order in an open-ended way. His very deliberate manipulations
of visual language challenge perception while at the same time unabashedly
engaging pleasure.
web sites:

http://www.bodybuilderandsportsman.com
http://www.kusseneers.com

www.gvsu.edu/artgallery

Fall Arts Celebration
Art Gallery Exhibit
Opening reception with the artists
Thursday, October 4, 5 –7 p.m.
Exhibition open
October 4 –November 2
M–F 10 a.m.–5 p.m. and Th 10 a.m.–7 p.m.
Private tours available available by appointment, call 616-331-2564

Shadows of Warhol

john phillips said i was channeling Warhol with this painting, the two color piece with red is the Warhol that he must've been talking about

John Phillips

hi Dennis
here's some stuff on the McCormick Place thing - it's like having a
Lava lamp in the lobby...


text from the wall plaque:

Big Red    2007
acrylic/canvas
174” x 138”

This painting is dedicated to Red Saunders; a composer, drummer,
bandleader, consummate session man and unsung hero who helped shape
the jazz and blues music associated with Chicago in the pivotal post
war years. In Chicago, the boundaries between jazz and other forms of
Black Music were highly permeable - the same individuals moved from
jobs in refined jazz combos to dates with wild bar-walking R&B
players. Red Saunders transitioned back and forth with the best of
them. Red could play adventurous and sophisticated big band jazz with
Sonny Blount (aka Sun Ra) on a Tuesday night and back up the sexy
guitar-driven urban blues of T-Bone Walker on the weekend. This
duality is one of the concepts informing this painting. Jazz and R&B/
Blues have many similarities and many differences. The painting
presents a mirrored image promoting a back and forth read – jazz on
the left and blues on the right.

John Phillips

John Phillips

Art in America Article



John Phillips at Bodybuilder & Sportsman - Chicago - Brief Article
Art in America, May, 2002 by Susan Snodgrass

Painter John Phillips is a consummate formalist and a bit of a sentimentalist. Throughout his career, Phillips has mined the history of abstract painting, working with a visual vocabulary that pays homage to artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden and Barnett Newman, while simultaneously imbuing abstraction with his own offbeat lyricism.



A fusion of Pop and minimalist sensibilities, Phillips's paintings embrace bright, idiosyncratic colors, cool surfaces, bold lines and flat shapes. Past works often contained the artist's signature scroll or ribbon motif, rendered as black, serpentine grids against expansive monochromatic planes. In four new paintings comprising his recent solo show, ribbons give way to a system of lines and ovoid shapes contained within large geometric fields of color. Although not officially part of the show, some earlier works were on view in the gallery's back room, including one "ribbon" painting and five small panel pieces whose tactile surfaces, built from thin layers of oil and wax, are punctuated by calligraphic arcs and cartoony squiggles.



Phillips first composes his arrangements using design software, then executes them in oils on rectangular canvases and circular panels. Although his compositions retain the flatness of the computer screen, they are transformed into dynamic explorations of color and perception. In each, the artist's quirky, geometric forms are interconnected by a network of colorful, sinuous lines that function both as grids and as optical foils that disrupt the pictorial space. In Back Talk (2002), a series of irregular spheres rendered in a limited range of soft grays is contrasted with a field seamlessly painted in gradations of the same hue. Within this restrained palette, subtle and not so subtle differences emerge from the same set of colors; light gray on top of dark gray creates a sense of illusionistic space, while image and background painted in similar tonalities reinforce the flatness of the picture plane. A Day-Glo green line linking the spheroid forms adds movement and heightens the formal tensions at play.



Similar investigations are carried out in Having Little Heart Attacks for You (2001), in which bubblegum-pink pods and luscious red wiggles form staccato notations within a rectangular field of ivory and cream, and in an untitled work from 2002, where odd ovals rendered in shades of coral, beige and peach occupy a pale blue ground. Phillips's deceptively simple paintings, always pleasing to the eye, deftly balance color, form and space, reflecting the artist's impassioned reverence for his medium and subject.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group

From Bodybuilder and Sportsman press release

Known for his intensely colored work investigating issues of perception and the figure/ground dilemma, Phillips's new work moves beyond his abstracted and trademark ribbons to forms that continue to challenge the serious issues of the painting tradition and are even more colloquial.

Slang--a kind of language occurring chiefly in casual and playful speech, made up typically of short-lived coinages and figures of speech that are deliberately used in place of standard terms for added raciness, humor, irreverence, or other effect. ‹The American Heritage Dictionary

It's a pretty hilarious notion to imagine anyone would ever make the pronouncement "painting is dead." The remark is so sober its profundity could only ever be rendered false. This truth was made clear quite recently when Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, claimed irony to be dead after the events of September 11, only to back peddle a few weeks later after the thoughtful response to the tragedies by the satirical newspaper, The Onion, gave the public permission to temper its grief with humor.

Certainly painting as a fine-art genre carries with it the heavy burden of art history, and it is the contemporary painter's task to make his or her practice relevant to the current moment. It's a perplexing project for the artist in the face of contemporary culture's penchant for levity and litheness. Through the course of his career, Chicago painter John Phillips has tackled this project employing the vocabulary of minimalism, abstraction, and color-field painting to create objects that resonate within the complexity of his chosen medium yet evince the ethereal, intellectual, and irreverent concerns of new art.

Phillips's attitude is most aptly found is his abstracted representations, most often, in the past, seen as banners and ribbons. In his new body of work, the forms in the compositions come across as even goofier than the vacuous ribbons--fat, awkward conduits of color that dare the viewer to find the sobriety of the painter's practice.

It's here that Phillips's accomplishments as a practitioner of a time-honored tradition come forward as the viewer becomes transfixed by the object and its authenticity becomes ever more clear. This is painting that is seriously cool.

John Phillips received his an MFA in 1979 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was a Whitney Fellow in 1978. He has had solo exhibitions at I-Space, N.A.M.E., Dart Gallery and Marianne Deson Gallery in Chicago. Phillips's work has also been seen in numerous group shows including "Art in Chicago, 1945 1995" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, "In Full Effect" at White Columns, New York, and "Critical Perspectives" at P.S. 1 in New York. Phillips is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts, Visual Artist Fellowship, in Painting, and two Illinois Arts Council grants.