Basel | ArtRegion: Basel - Oberrhein

Weiss Falk

Richard Phillips: Drawing

4. März – 3. April 2021

Oskar Weiss and Oliver Falk are thrilled to announce Drawing, an exhibition of recent work by Richard Phillips. This occasion marks the artist’s first solo show in Switzerland since 2000. It is a presentation of eight large scale charcoal and chalk drawings. The series consists of portraits that share a seductive quality with their source imagery which ranges from Seventies Men’s Magazines to contemporary Instagram. “Throwaway images” as the artist sometimes calls them. Material that has the “sensual and psychological presence of something that is not being regarded as an image that you look at with a focus”. The drawings situate themselves within this lineage of commercial and more disposable image economies. On gallery walls these “throwaway images” are monumentalized as a contradiction of expectation. They are frozen by the artist for our inspection but the drawings remain as poised and couthly impervious to critical scrutiny as the models they depict. Phillips is interested in how the models look – towards the viewer and how they are situated to address him/her. A close look reveals a grid present in the background. This is a technical measure for enlarging the image on a bigger canvas, left intentionally to remind the viewer of representation’s conventions. Contrary to the contemplative state of mind so strongly linked to the study of drawing, the gaze bounces back from the image screen. Since the beginning of his practice, the artist has worked with drawings that are both preparatory for his oil paintings and functional as autonomous pieces. Recently Phillips started using paper that is primed with gelatin (an ancient artistic technique) which gives the drawing marks an immersive, almost haptic quality. The drawings shimmer in light, purple hued in the intersections where the charcoal and the chalk overlay.