Richard Phillips at Gagosian Gallery West 24th Street

When we can't determine what art is-when we get to that point where we're not sure, that's the strongest likelihood that we're actually experiencing something great. That's what the art world is most afraid of, because we don't know how to assign value, whether it's cultural or otherwise. In a way the films were meant to be a destabilizing artwork. They exist in another area, a zone where we were free to work.

--Richard Phillips

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Richard Phillips.

For Phillips, critique is as much an intrinsic material in the conception and staging of his work as the materials of their making. His conflating of subject and genre continues to provide challenging comment on the condition and reach of contemporary art.

Phillips has embarked on a new phase of work that hinges on the self-awareness of real-life subjects. Lindsay Lohan (2011) and Sasha Grey (2011), his first two films, made their debut at the "Commercial Break" film project at the 2011 Biennale di Venezia. In these "motion portraits," the notorious actresses pose erotically--Grey in a modernist John Lautner home, and Lohan in an aquamarine infinity pool. Both actresses project self-conscious recognition in their performances and in turn point toward the transformative potential of narrative action, framed by their compelling beauty. Phillips's third film, First Point (2012) marks his second collaboration with Lohan and third collaboration with legendary surf filmmaker Taylor Steele. A contemporary film noir, First Point juxtaposes haunting nocturnal imagery with surf sequences in which female pro-surfer Kassia Meador (Lohan's acknowledged stunt double) and Lohan herself appear.

Phillips uses collaborative forms of image production to reorder the relationship of Pop art to its subjects. The staging and format of his films presage the return of their subjects as paintings; eventually, they form the foundation for lush, large-scale works such as Sasha (2012), Lindsay II (2012), and Lindsay III (2012), realist portraits of the place-holders of their own mediated existence. In addition to working with Lohan and Grey, Phillips has collaborated with Brazilian supermodel Adriana Lima to create a new series of paintings that depict her against backdrops of iconic Brazilian landmarks, such as Oscar Niemeyer's Cathédral de Brasília, the patterned sidewalks of Copa Cabana, and the favelas of Rio. In these scenes, such as Adriana I (2012), in which Lima poses seductively across the roof of the cathedral, the impact of her preternatural beauty and the aura she commands as a supermodel is conflated, and thus equated with, national icons of economic, political, and religious culture.

Born in Massachusetts in 1962, Richard Phillips lives and works in New York. He has exhibited his work in many individual and group exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe. Recent solo exhibitions include "Richard Phillips: Paintings and Drawings," Le Consortium, Dijon, 2004; "Richard Phillips," Kunstverein Hamburg, 2002, and "Richard Phillips," Kunsthalle Zurich, 2000. He is represented in important public and private collections worldwide including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Denver Museum, Colorado; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; UBS Paine Webber Art Collection, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; Van Abbe museum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His films, Lindsay Lohan and Sasha Grey, premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2011 as well as in an exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane in February 2012. First Point premiered at Art Unlimited at Art Basel, Switzerland in June 2012.

"Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York

on view May 2–September 3, 2012

The Museum of Modern Art presents the first U.S. exhibition of Taryn Simon’s (American, b. 1975) photographic project A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters. This powerful, elaborately constructed photographic work was produced over a four-year period (2008–11), during which the artist travelled around the world researching and recording “bloodlines” and their related stories. In each of the “chapters” that make up the work, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance, or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects Simon documents include victims of genocide in Bosnia, test rabbits infected with a lethal disease in Australia, the first woman to hijack an aircraft, and the living dead in India. The exhibition is organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.

A Living Man Declared Dead is divided into 18 chapters, nine of which will be featured at MoMA. Each chapter is comprised of three segments. The first segment is a large portrait series systematically presenting individuals directly related by blood. The sequence of portraits is structured to include the living ascendants and descendants of a single individual. Simon also shows empty portraits, representing living members of a bloodline who could not be photographed. The portraits are followed by a text panel, in which the artist constructs narratives and collects details about the distinct bloodlines. She also notes the reasons for the absences in the portrait panel, which include imprisonment, military service, dengue fever, and women not being granted permission to be photographed. The last segment is Simon’s “footnote” panel, comprising images that expand and locate the stories in each of Simon’s chapters.

Ms. Marcoci says, “Simon’s major project locates photography’s capacity to at once probe complex narratives in contemporary societies and to organize the material in classification processes characteristic of an archive, a system that connects identity, genealogy, history, and memory.” Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate. In contrast to the methodical ordering of a bloodline, the central elements of the stories—violence, resilience, corruption, and survival—disorient the highly structured appearance of the work.  A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters highlights the space between text and image, absence and presence, and order and anarchy.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Taryn Simon was born in 1975 in New York, where she lives and works. Her previous work includes Contraband (2010), an archive of images of items that were detained or seized from passengers and mail entering the United States from abroad; An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007), which reveals objects, sites, and spaces that are integral to America’s foundation, mythology, or daily functioning but remain inaccessible or unknown to a public audience;  and The Innocents (2003), which documents cases of wrongful conviction in the United States, calling into question photography’s function as a credible witness and arbiter of justice. Simon's work has been the subject of monographic exhibitions at Tate Modern, London; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and MoMA PS1, New York. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters was shown in its entirety at Tate Modern, London (May 25, 2011–January 2, 2012), and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (September 21, 2011–January 1, 2012).

VISITOR INFORMATION
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd STreet
New York, NY  10019
U.S.A.
T. +1.212.708.9400
Website: MoMA | Simon