Julia Phillips “New Album”

Matthew Marks Gallery 523 W 24th St.

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Matthew Marks presents Julia Phillips: New Album, the next exhibition in his gallery at 523 West 24th Street. The artist’s first one-person show at the gallery, it includes four new sculptures.

In her work Phillips presents metaphors for social and psychological experiences. These metaphors are both mechanical and bodily, and the experiences they describe typically focus on power relations between two individuals. Her recent works have widened the focus, first by looking at how individuals and institutions interrelate, and second by highlighting not only antagonistic but also conciliatory functions, like negotiation and observation, replacing subject/object conflict with non-hierarchical dynamics.

Each sculpture includes stainless steel components joined to ceramic elements, some cast from human bodies or mechanical devices, others depicting imaginary organs that the artist calls Soul and Spirit. Their glazed finishes replicate a range of flesh tones in layered colors, which Phillips achieves by firing them multiple times. Some of the sculptures include recurring elements, such as handles or wing nuts, that encourage the viewer to envision direct physical engagement with the work. All of these components come together on stone slab bases of quartzite, granite, or marble.

Julia Phillips (born 1985, Hamburg) lives and works in Chicago and Berlin. She has had one-person exhibitions at MoMA PS1 (2018) and the Kunstverein Braunschweig (2019) and was featured in the Berlin Biennial and the New Museum Triennial (both 2018). Her work has been shown at museums including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.