Richard Phillips

Richard Phillips was born in 1962 in Marblehead, Massachusetts. He earned a BFA in painting from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston in 1984 and an MFA in painting from the Yale School of Art in 1986. His first solo exhibitions were held at the Edward Thorp Gallery in SoHo, New York, between 1994 and 1996, and he was included in the Whitney Biennial in 1997 and in Greater New York at MoMA PS1 in 2000.

Through the 2000s, Phillips built a European museum presence with solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Zurich (2000), Kunstverein Hamburg (2002), and Le Consortium in Dijon (2004). His paintings, based on appropriated imagery from magazines, advertising, and pornography, brought him into dialogue with fashion and celebrity culture directly. In 2011 he presented Most Wanted at White Cube in London and premiered the films Lindsay Lohan and Sasha Grey at the 54th Venice Biennale; the Lindsay Lohan film was later screened at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane in 2012. He continues to live and work in New York City and is currently represented by Gagosian and Almine Rech.

Note on identity: the name Richard Phillips is shared by other individuals, including a Michigan artist exonerated after 46 years of wrongful imprisonment who also produces and sells artwork. This profile concerns the contemporary American painter born in 1962 and represented by Gagosian and Almine Rech.

Phillips's paintings have been read consistently, by his gallery and by institutional writers, as a critical engagement with the visual language of advertising and mass media rather than a straightforward celebration of it. His inclusion in the 1997 Whitney Biennial and the 2000 Greater New York survey at MoMA PS1 placed him early within a generation of artists reworking commercial and pornographic imagery through painting, and his subsequent solo museum exhibitions in Zurich, Hamburg, and Dijon extended that reception across Europe. His 2011 film collaborations, screened at the Venice Biennale, were widely treated as an extension of the same interest in celebrity and media surface into a new medium. No verbatim critical assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for reproduction here.

Phillips's market is difficult to characterize precisely from public sources. Aggregated market data cite a highest reported auction price of roughly USD 384,000 for a painting, but the specific work, auction house, sale location, and exact date behind that figure are not published in the freely available portions of the major art market databases, and no major auction house has publicized a Richard Phillips result exceeding that level. Collectors should treat any single public price point for this artist with caution and verify current figures directly with a subscription auction database or an auction house specialist before relying on them.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Richard Phillips, so verification should run through his current galleries, Gagosian and Almine Rech, and through conventional provenance documentation rather than a raisonne entry. Because public auction data for this artist is sparse and the highest reported figure lacks confirmed lot-level detail, collectors should be especially careful to document gallery invoices and exhibition history for any work under consideration. Given that the name is shared by at least one other artist, buyers should also confirm attribution to the correct Richard Phillips, the American painter born in 1962, before any purchase.