ART-PRESENTATION: Julia Phillips-New Album

Julia Phillips is a German American artist who was born and studied in Hamburg before moving to New York to complete an MFA at Columbia University and participate in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. Her sculptures imply new uses for the body that hover uneasily between desire and violence.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Matthew Marks Gallery Archive

Comprised of three new sculptures and one installation Julia Phillips’ solo exhibition, “New Album” represents a change in tone for the artist, focusing on interactions entered into willingly, such as negotiation and mediation. For the first time, Phillips positions the interacting parties symmetrically, highlighting the mutual nature of these works. Primarily working with ceramics, Phillips creates objects and scenes that are intimately connected to the body. Her sculptures often propose various support structures for the human form, while emphasizing its absence. Impressions of the body are visible through casts of limbs, orifices, handprints, and other corporeal traces. Though evocative of physical functions, these works also produce social and psychological resonances. For Phillips, the body is materially, linguistically, and metaphorically entangled in politics, as suggested by terms such as “manipulator,” “protector,” and “extruder” that appear in the titles of her works. Directives for specific actions of constraining, armoring, or penetrating the body, they hint at how formal arrangements double as relations of power. Pairing ceramic elements with metal armatures, Phillips references the human form in her work through casts and physical impressions of her own body. However, the body is never depicted in full, allowing viewers room to imagine their own participation and complicity in the acts suggested by her sculptures. Drawing upon a range of influences, from functional objects (furniture, armor) to Black feminist thought and theory, she underscores the body and the psyche as sites upon which power and control are routinely enacted and claimed.

Info: Matthew Marks Gallery, 523 West 24 Street, New York, Duration: 10/9-17/10/20, Days & Hours: Open by appointment only, www.matthewmarks.com