Alexandra Phillips

Alexandra Phillips (Port Chester NY, 1988) is an American artist currently working in Rotterdam. She spent much of her educational years in North Carolina, where she attended an art-oriented high school programme at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and a Bachelor of Art History from the Kansas City Art Institute. Her work comments on our fleeting and insatiable existence with a light touch and a witty sense of humour. She works with the intrinsic but often overlooked properties of everyday materials, showing us their unforeseen potential and appeal. Phillips attended the Penland School of Crafts (2006), received a Van Lier Fellowship (2013), was resident artist at Atelier Mondial in Basel, Switzerland (2016) and attended the Jan van Eyck Academy in 2017. In 2020, she received a research and development grant from the CBK of Rotterdam. Her work was nominated for the 2021 Royal Prize for Modern Painting. She has received support from Stichting Droom en Daad and Mondriaan Fonds. In 2011, Phillips co-founded Purepropaganda.org Magazine with artist Jan Henderikse (born 1932 Delft NL), an absurdist design agency that continues to operate in various forms today.

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It is the multiformity that first catches the eye: Alexandra Phillips seems to work with whatever crosses her path, with materials and objects that have apparently little to do with each other, sometimes from the realm of the arts, sometimes from the street - literally. And so plaster, the study material of the classical sculptor par excellence, enters into a relationship with polystyrene and cardboard, packaging material, old ceramic tiles or foam rubber with the greatest possible self-evidence.

It is a multiformity that enables Phillips to stretch traditional categories such as sculpture and painting, assemblage and installation, and to provide them with a new meaning. There are delicate things that look strong. Light things that appear heavy. Dense seeming things that easily crumble, some things that seem water tight but leak', Phillips wrote in spring 2016 about her fascination with the unexpected properties of materials, things and things.

With Phillips, little is what it seems, you always get more than you bargained for, more than you could have expected as a viewer.

From: A Day in Court, 2016 - Antoon Melissen