Peter Phillips

Peter Phillips (21 May 1939 – 23 June 2025) was an English artist whose work ranged from conventional oils on canvas to multi-media compositions and collages to sculptures and architecture.

As an originator of Pop art, Phillips trained at the Royal College of Art with his contemporaries David Hockney, Allen Jones, R.B. Kitaj and others figures in British Pop Art. When he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship he moved to New York, where he exhibited alongside American counterparts Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist. Phillips later returned to Europe, where he resided and continued to paint and exhibit.

Biography For Men Only – Starring MM and BB (1961), Oil, wood and collage on canvas.Phillips was born in 1939 in Bournville, Birmingham, England. From 1953 to 1955, he studied at Moseley Road Secondary School of Art in Birmingham and from 1955 to 1959 at the Birmingham School of Art. In 1959, he visited Paris and started to exhibit at the RBA Galleries in London.

1960s Between 1959 and 1962, Phillips studied at the Royal College of Art where he saw reproductions of work by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

From 1962 to 1963, he taught at the Coventry College of Art and the Birmingham College of Art. In 1963, he was represented at the Paris Biennale, and in 1964 his work was included in the Pop Art exhibition shown at the Hague, Vienna and Berlin.

In 1964, Phillips was awarded the Harkness Fellowship, which brought him to New York where he lived from 1964 until 1966 and while there travelled throughout the United States with his close friend, Allen Jones.

Phillips lived in Australia in the final decade of his life.

An open-air exhibition of Phillips' work opened in his native Birmingham in June 2026; the curator Ruth Millington described it as "the perfect way to remember him" and celebrate the influence of his home city on his work.