Claire Phillips
Claire Phillips is an editor, researcher, and writer based in London. She regularly contributes to publications including Aesthetica, Art Papers, The Seen, and this is tomorrow.
Doron Langberg: Give Me Love
By Claire PhillipsThere is a man floating in the bathtub. Iridescent violet, red, and ochre seem to seep from his pores into the sultry waters below, staining the porcelain bath and tiles. We feel the humidity pressing in, as if someone has just pulled the bathroom door shut. The air is intoxicating and close; we could be in the midst of a fever dream.
Lisa Brice
By Claire PhillipsThrough her work, Brice reclaims the female nude, depicting a cast of women who do not perform for the pleasure of the male gaze, but for their own.
Wild Horses
By Claire PhillipsA couple is lying in bed. A woman, with her arms raised and left knee bent, leans languorously on the man behind her, who buries his face in a pillow. Bright light from the open curtains falls over the peaks and valleys of their bodies. We feel awkward as we stumble into their private sphere. But are we voyeurs or invaders? The feeling prevails through Wild Horses, Sim Smith gallery’s exhibition of paintings and photographs in southeast London, which focuses upon the subject of couples in various guises.
Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing
By Claire PhillipsAt the heart of Packer’s first institutional show outside the US is the desire to make visible the invisible and do justice to stories like Sandra Bland’s, creating space in which to mourn Black deaths.
David Shrigley: DO NOT TOUCH THE WORMS
By Claire PhillipsLife in 2020 is starting to feel like one big can of worms. That is how David Shrigley seems to think we might be feeling about it in any case. For his largest solo exhibition to date, DO NOT TOUCH THE WORMS (2020), the Turner Prize-nominee known for his distinctly wry British humor has filled a gallery of Copenhagen Contemporary’s industrial warehouse on Refshaleøen island with twenty, larger-than-life, inflatable replicas of the pink, writhing creatures.
In Conversation
Emily Rapp Black with Claire Phillips
By Claire PhillipsWritten with great bravura, this first-person essay collection is as carefully researched as it is revealing; and will undoubtedly find itself a classic among the robust literature on Kahlo.
