Phillips, Peter

Phillips, Peter (1939– ). British painter, born in Birmingham. He studied at the Birmingham College of Art, 1955–9, and at the Royal College of Art, 1959–62, and with a number of fellow RCA students— Derek Boshier, David Hockney, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj—he emerged as one of the leading exponents of British Pop art at the Young Contemporaries exhibition of 1961. 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 and abstraction are combined. The Phaidon Dictionary of Twentieth Century Art (1973) describes the result as ‘a slightly pointless marriage of comic book image and Post-Cubist composition'. In 1964–6 Phillips lived in New York, then settled in Zurich.