NYAB Event - Brad Phillips “Sex, Sex, and Death”

Brad Phillips “Sex, Sex, and Death”

Louis B. James Gallery

This event has ended.

Louis B. James presents Sex, Sex, and Death, an exhibition of new work by Canadian artist and writer Brad Phillips, his first solo show in New York since 2007. Comprised entirely of watercolor paintings made within the last year, the exhibition encapsulates the ongoing tension embodied in Phillips’ oeuvre between the appearance of autobiographical intimacy and cool, formal remove.

Phillips deploys deftly accomplished painterly realism in the service of works that evince the offhand immediacy of snapshot photography as well as the aesthetic emotionality of Confessional Poetry. Each painting is a scene framed and composed to appear casual, though meticulously rendered. Individual images imply a personal history, though the body of work as a whole gets at a larger project: the illusion of a cohesive, almost comic, tragically romantic persona that conceals the essential inscrutability of internal psychic life.

In a departure for Phillips, each image is surrounded by an artificial mat and titled and signed on the face. This formal invention reifies Phillips’ control over the narrative structure of the work as well as his interest in conventions of photographic display.

Brad Phillips (b. 1974) lives and works in Toronto. He has had solo exhibitions at Monte Clark Gallery, Toronto and Vancouver; CSA Space, Vancouver; Groeflin Maag Galerie, Basel; Wallspace, NY, among others. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Oakville Galleries, Ontario; the Vancouver Art Gallery; Galerie de l’UQAM, Montreal; La Maison Rouge, Paris; Kybher ICA, Halifax; the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro; among other galleries and institutions. His work is in the collection of the Royal Bank of Canada; The Glenbow Museum, Calgary; and the Hauser & Wirth Collection, Switzerland. He writes regularly Millions Magazine and previously for Hunter & Cook.