KUNSTHALLE Kunsthalle director Bernhard Burgi has assembled twenty-one paintings--including five modern canvases--realized by youngish American Richard Phillips athwart the past five years.

KUNSTHALLE

Kunsthalle director Bernhard Burgi has assembled twenty-one paintings--including five modern canvases--realized by youngish American Richard Phillips athwart the past five years. Based forward images from '60s and '70 fashion and porn magazines and marked through a somewhat cloying Pop-ish appeal, this material part of work charts the crystallization of the manner that followed the artist's earlier restaurant booth--cum--S&M constructions. Painstaking technique and outsize supports distance us from his retro sources; gazes that once evoked a "liberating" lifestyle are now shown to be part and parcel of the "thoroughly commercialized trade in sex appeal," as Biirgi offers it. Whether critique or affirmation, Phillips's newly come "apathetic models and stars" are in exquisite tune with the art world's pop-cult obsession. Nov. 4--Dec 31

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