Australian Financial Review on Phillips and the NF&W Festival
The festival that serves art with its food.
The annual foodie fair has teamed up with chef Josh Lopez for the 80th birthday retrospective and gallery opening of resident British pop artist Peter Phillips.
Artist Peter Phillips can see the paradox. As a founding figure of the British pop art movement in the 1960s, he embraced commercial icons, as did many of his contemporaries. In his early artwork, the Birmingham-born artist, now living in the Noosa hinterland on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, adopted images from his working-class upbringing, such as arcade machines, pin-up girls and motorbikes.
Now, the commercial world is embracing him back. Fortune Distillery, launched in mid-March by Noosa Heads’ Land & Sea Brewery, is releasing a limited-edition specially crafted gin featuring Phillips’ art on six labels, one from each decade of his career.
And in a second collaboration, Sweden’s Happy Socks has adapted some of Phillips’ iconography to produce a three-pair box set, limited to 400.
“There are a lot of paradoxes in this business,” quips Phillips over the phone from his home at Tinbeerwah, a 15-minute drive from Noosa Heads.
The partnerships are part of two events at this month’s Noosa Food & Wine Festival – POP! Pop Art, Bubbles and Canapés and Progressive Pop – designed to celebrate the artist’s forthcoming 80th birthday, the opening of his sizeable studio and gallery at Tinbeerwah and a retrospective of his work. The events take place at his new gallery at 36 McIntyre Lane, Tinbeerwah.
In his early days, Phillips studied with the likes of David Hockney and Allen Jones at London’s Royal College of Art. He moved to New York in 1964, exhibiting alongside America’s pop art pin-ups Andy Warhol and
Roy Lichtenstein before heading to Europe, where his work took on new directions. This included playing with art forms such as mosaic, relief and collage and, more recently, experimenting with fractals and algorithms.
“Looking back, it’s staggering how much I have actually done. When you’re doing it, it doesn’t feel like work,” says Phillips, whose
work is held in the collections of New York’s Met and Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the National Gallery in Canberra.
As part of the retrospective, the gallery will display up to 50 works from Phillips’ private collection, including never before seen pieces such as his first painting, self-portraits from 1954, a couple of nudes from his days at Birmingham College and sketchbooks.
“It’s a very personal show,” says his daughter, Zoe Phillips-Price, who helps to manage her father’s collection and was instrumental in setting up the collaborations.
Phillips-Price is also organising a short documentary celebrating her father, with well-wishers such as the US rock band The Cars, artists Allen Jones, Peter Blake and Derek Boshier, and art historian Marco Livingstone. “It’s a birthday card from me to him,” says Phillips-Price.
Of course, you can’t have food festival events without food. Josh Lopez, erstwhile executive chef of Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art jumped at the chance to design menus inspired by Phillips’ art.
For POP! Pop Art, Bubbles and Canapés, he is creating six canapés each reflecting an artwork from a decade of Phillips’ career. From his pop art period, for example, the 1966 maquette Hybrid inspired Lopez to rustle up a translucent potato plinth with blue scampi roe entwined with the red of poached scampi meat.
Another appetiser mixes chocolate with pure fruit extract to reproduce the psychedelic-like colours of Phillips’ study of fractals over the past decade.
“The composition of the art was really important to the execution and creativity behind the canapés,” explains Lopez.
For Progressive Pop, Lopez is designing a degustation lunch menu of six courses – one per decade – again tracing the progression of Phillips’ artwork. But what he’s cooking will remain under wraps until the day.
“We want to keep it a secret,” says Phillips-Price.
The art-food combo, a first for Noosa Food & Wine, is part of a suite of innovative experiences being introduced by new festival director Sheridah Puttick. “I looked at the festival this year and, for me, it’s always about putting people together and allowing them to get creative,” she says.
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