Brad Phillips (born 1974 in Toronto, Canada) is a contemporary Canadian artist and writer. He is best known for his work around subjects like mental illness, suicide, fakery, addiction and pop culture. His first book of short stories, Essays and Fictions, was published in 2019. His first novel, You Don't Have to Die will be published by Tyrant Books in 2021.
Phillips grew up in the Toronto suburbs of Pickering and Scarborough. [1] [2] He resided in Vancouver between 2002 and 2013 [1] and currently lives in Miami Beach, Florida.
He is married to the artist and poet Cristine Brache. [3] [4]
Aesthetically, Phillips is noted for his photorealist style and often references his own photographs to compose his paintings. [5] [6] He is known for his dark and often sinister imagery [7] as well as text-based works, many of which include literary references. He often employs satire, autobiography, and black humor in his paintings. [8] Phillips tends not to contextualize his work or speak about his intentions.
Phillips has had notable solo exhibitions at James Fuentes LLC (New York), Division Gallery (Toronto), Fierman Gallery (New York), Wallspace Gallery (New York), Monte Clark Gallery (Vancouver and Toronto), Residence Gallery (London, UK), Groeflin Maag Galerie (Zurich), Galerie ZK (Berlin), and at the Liste 07 Young Art Fair (Basel). His 2013 exhibition at Louis B. James Gallery was listed as one of the top 100 Fall shows by Modern Painters (magazine). His 2019 exhibition at Harper's Books was listed as one 18 shows not to miss in New York on Artnet, and was critic's picks in Artforum. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Gallery, the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and in Guy Maddin's "The Keyhole Project" at the Beursschouwburg in Belgium [9] and has been shown at international art fairs, including the Armory Show in New York, the NADA Fair in Miami, the Toronto International Art Fair and others. Phillips, representing Western Canada, was a finalist in the RBC Canadian Painting Competition in 2004. Phillips' artwork has been featured in The New York Times, Mousse Magazine, Blackbook, frieze, Carte Blanche Volume II, The Walrus. [10] In 2017, Phillips began a conceptual t-shirt project that has become a minor online phenomenon. [11]
Phillips' works are included in the collections of the Glenbow Museum, the Capital Group Companies, the Royal Bank of Canada, Hauser & Wirth Collection, and the Toronto philanthropist W. Bruce C Bailey. [5] In 2017, Phillips was commissioned to create a large scale painting for the Willis Tower in Chicago (formerly the Sears Tower).
Phillips' first book of short stories, Essays and Fictions, was published by Tyrant Books in January 2019. There was an extensive feature on Phillips in Purple Magazine's 2020 S/S Edition, The Brain Issue Articles written by Phillips have been published in Modern Painters (magazine), [12] The Enemy, [13] The Art Book Review, [14] Muumuu House, and Hunter and Cook. Artists he has interviewed for journals include Jeff Wall, Sean Landers, Daniel Gordon, Laura Owens and Kirsten Stoltmann. Phillips is also a regular contributor to Modern Painters (magazine), ArtSlant, [15] The Art Book Review, Millions Magazine, [16] Adult Magazine, [17] and The Editorial Magazine, where he is a contributing editor. [18] He is a regular contributor to Autre Magazine and Purple Fashion Magazine.
Clyfford Still was an American painter, and one of the leading figures in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, who developed a new, powerful approach to painting in the years immediately following World War II. Still has been credited with laying the groundwork for the movement, as his shift from representational to abstract painting occurred between 1938 and 1942, earlier than his colleagues like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, who continued to paint in figurative-surrealist styles well into the 1940s.
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George Wesley Bellows was an American realist painter, known for his bold depictions of urban life in New York City. He became, according to the Columbus Museum of Art, "the most acclaimed American artist of his generation".
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The Canadian Group of Painters (CGP) was a collective of 28 painters from across Canada who came together as a group in 1933.
Painters Eleven was a group of abstract artists active in Canada between 1953 and 1960.
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Oscar Cahén was a Canadian painter and illustrator. Cahén is best known as a member of Painters Eleven, a group of abstract artists active in Toronto from 1953-1960, and for his fifteen years of work as an illustrator of Canadian magazines.
Harold Barling Town, OC was a Canadian abstract painter. He is best known as a member of Painters Eleven a group of abstract artists active in Toronto from 1954-1960. Town coined the name of the group, which was based simply on the number of artists that were present the first meeting. He also worked as an illustrator, a profession he credited with imparting a sense of discipline that would last throughout his entire artistic career. His early illustrative appeared in magazines such as Maclean's and Mayfair.
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Canadian art refers to the visual as well as plastic arts originating from the geographical area of contemporary Canada. Art in Canada is marked by thousands of years of habitation by Indigenous peoples followed by waves of immigration which included artists of European origins and subsequently by artists with heritage from countries all around the world. The nature of Canadian art reflects these diverse origins, as artists have taken their traditions and adapted these influences to reflect the reality of their lives in Canada.
Rachel Berman was an American-born Canadian painter and children's book illustrator, who lived and worked in Canada, the United States, and Ireland.
Noah Becker is an American and Canadian artist, writer, publisher of Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, and jazz saxophonist who lives and works in New York City. He is a contributing writer for Art in America Magazine, Canadian Art Magazine and the Huffington Post.
Kathleen Jean Munn is recognized today as a pioneer of modern art in Canada, though she remained on the periphery of the Canadian art scene during her lifetime. She imagined conventional subjects in a radically new visual vocabulary as she combined the traditions of European art with modern art studies in New York. She died at age eighty-seven, unaware that her long-held hope for “a possible future for my work” was about to become reality.
Paul Hampden Dougherty was an American marine painter. Dougherty was recognized for his American Impressionism paintings of the coasts of Maine and Cornwall in the years after the turn of the 20th century. His work has been described as bold and masculine, and he was best known for his many paintings of breakers crashing against rocky coasts and mountain landscapes. Dougherty also painted still lifes, created prints and sculpted.
Karl Knaths was an American artist whose personal approach to the Cubist aesthetic led him to create paintings which, while abstract, contained readily identifiable subjects. In addition to the Cubist painters, his work shows influence by Paul Cézanne, Wassily Kandinsky, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Paul Klee, Stuart Davis, and Agnes Weinrich. It is nonetheless, in use of heavy line, rendering of depth, disciplined treatment of color, and architecture of planes, distinctly his own.
Cristine Brache is an American artist, filmmaker, and writer of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent. Her work spans video, sculpture, and poetry. She has since 2012 been exhibited internationally, in Europe, North America, and Australia. Her debut book, Poems, was published by Codette in 2018.
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