Background
Peter Phillips was born on May 21, 1939 in Birmingham, United Kingdom.
Peter Phillips was born on May 21, 1939 in Birmingham, United Kingdom.
In 1953 - 1955 Peter attended Moseley Road Secondary School of Art in Birmingham. Whilst at school Phillips was taught painting and decorating, sign writing, graphic design and technical draughtsmanship. Then he studied at Birmingham College of Art from 1955 - 1959 and at the Royal College of Art in 1959 - 1962.
In 1959 Peter visited Paris and started to exhibit at the RBA Galleries in London. From 1962 to 1963, he taught at the Coventry College of Art and the Birmingham College of Art. In 1963, he was represented at the Paris Biennale, and in 1964 his work was included in the Pop Art exhibition shown at the Hague, Vienna and Berlin. In 1964 he moved to New York and readily absorbed the trappings of youth culture - glamour, energy and sexuality. His paintings of the period had a machine feel with hard polished surfaces, achieved by use of an air brush, and images borrowed from the funfair, pin-ups and comic books. He achieved similar effects in the screenprint series PNEUmatics, which made full use of the skills he learnt at school and gave the prints an intentional machine-made look akin to commercial art production.
In 1965, he had his first one-man exhibition at the Kornblee Gallery in New York. A year later, Phillips returned to Europe, and from 1968 to 1969, he was guest teacher at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg. Over the following decades, Phillips travelled extensively, picking up inspiration from the various places he journeyed and incorporating it into his work. In 1972, he had a retrospective at the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, and in 1976 at the Tate Gallery in London. In 1977 he had a retrospective in Milan. In 1981, Phillips' travels took him to Australia. In 1982 - 1983 he had a retrospective exhibition shown at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool; the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford; the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne; the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh; Southampton Art Gallery and the Barbican Art Gallery in London.
The decade of the nineties brought Phillips' work to Canada and the United States, for exhibitions in Montreal, Boston, Houston, and New York. He was a featured artist at the Fundacio Miro and Casal Solleric in Majorca in 1996. In 1998, he was exhibited in London at the "Freedom of Choices" exhibition. At the same time, Phillips built and expanded his property in Majorca to his own design, which has been featured in numerous architecture, gardening, and home magazines. In 1995, he designed the Granada Television idents and endboards featuring the "G-arrow."
Claude-Marion Phillips died from cancer on 30 January 2003. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Ulster Museum in Belfast, among others.
Typically his imagery is drawn from modern American culture - jukeboxes, pinball machines, automobiles, film star pin-ups and so on - painted in the tight, glossy manner of commercial art. However, the images are usually set into bold heraldic frameworks or fragmented into sections and reorganized, so that illusionism, reinforced by the use of spray-paint technique, and abstraction are combined.
In 2014 Peter wass elected Honorary Member of the Royal Birmingham Society of Arts.
In 1964 Peter married Dinah Donald. Their daughter Tiffany was born in London in 1966. The couple divorced in 1967, and already in 1970 Peter married Marion-Claude Xylander. His second daughter, Zoe Lana, was born in Zurich in 1981.