Tony Phillips

Tony Phillips, Humble Supplicant, oil on canvas, 25" x 21", 1987.

Tony Phillips (born 1937) is an American artist and educator based in Chicago whose work has included painting, drawing and film. He is associated with figurative and surrealist currents of Chicago art in the later 20th century, without precisely being identified with such groups as the Imagists or The Hairy Who; critics have suggested that the lack of such affiliations has caused him and similar artists in the city to be comparatively overlooked. His art employs painterly, softly modeled representation that belies sometimes dark psychological explorations and fantastical or archetypal scenarios. Art in America critic Robert Berlind wrote, "Phillips's best pictures, with their particular tension between humor and eeriness, between the familiar and the eccentric, between the fanciful and the obsessive, are like a high-wire act, carried off in dream time." He has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council and Art Institute of Chicago. He is a professor emeritus of painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Life and career Anthony Stuart Wiley Phillips was born in Miami Beach, Florida in 1937 and raised in Rochester, New York. While at Yale, he studied painting with Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein, Esteban Vicente and Neil Welliver, and received a grant to travel to the École Americaine des Beaux-Arts in France in 1961, where he studied sculpture with Etienne-Henri Martin.

Following his graduation, Phillips lived in New York City and taught at the School of Visual Arts. After receiving a one-year post-graduate fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, he moved to Chicago to take a position at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1969. Later, he exhibited at the Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, Lyons Weir Gallery, National Academy Museum, Block Museum of Art, Islip Art Museum, MCA Chicago ("Surrealism: the Conjured Life," 2015–6), and Evanston Art Center, among others. Inertia—a prizewinner at the Toronto Super-8 and Ann Arbor film festivals—presented time-lapse footage of Phillips sitting motionless in a chair in the desert from dawn until sunset, impervious to heat, dust and wind; New York Times critic Benjamin Genocchio described it as "simultaneously an endurance performance piece and a study in changing light and atmospheric effects" that recalled the films of Andy Warhol. He was also an instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Palo Alto Art Center in California.

Recognition Phillips has received fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1978, 1985), Illinois Arts Council (1984, 1988, 1990) and the Art Institute of Chicago (Jacob and Bessie Levy Prize, 1985). Elmhurst College, the Illinois State Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.