Richard Phillips: Smiley

Richard Phillips created Smiley, an eighteen-color lithograph, in collaboration with Idem Paris in 2021. It is based on an oil-on-linen painting of the same name from 2000. In his practice, Phillips engages the complex web of human obsessions related to sexuality, politics, power, and death that are constantly exploited in mainstream media. Subjecting popular images to a range of classical painterly techniques, he estranges their familiarity and thus imbues them with new meaning.