BRITISH POP ARTIST PETER PHILLIPS ANNOUNCES COLLABORATION WITH HAPPY SOCKS

Peter Phillips – one of the preeminent British Pop Artists of our time – is proud to announce a unique collaboration with fashionably acclaimed Swedish sock company Happy Socks.

Born into a working class family, Phillips studied at the Royal College of Art in London during the early 1960s, alongside fellow classmates Derek Boshier, David Hockney, Allen Jones, and R. B. Kitaj, among others. Melding commercial iconography – such as the arcade machines, pin-up girls and motorbikes representative of his Birmingham upbringing – with such commercial techniques as airbrushing, Phillips has created a body of work that is both formally dynamic and thought-provoking.

Happy Socks is known for its unique collaborations with such artists as The Keith Haring and Andy Warhol Foundations, as well as industry icons Iris Apfel and Dave LaChapelle, and retailers Barneys New York, Opening Ceremony and Colette. Inspired by Phillips’ unique craft and legacy that consist of over a thousand pieces of art, the designs take cues from some of his most iconic and memorable imagery, including “Four Stars” (1963), “Impeller” (1972), and “Custom Painting No. 6” (1965). The collaboration will be presented in a 400 limited edition box set containing a three pairs of socks – with Phillips’ artwork prominently featured.

Peter’s relationship to fashion extends beyond this collaboration. The artist’s late wife, Claude-Marion Phillips, was a prominent German model featured on the front cover major fashion magazines. Claude worked closely with Ossie Clark and other fashion icons of the 60s and 70s after she left her modelling career to become a designer. She owned two successful shops in Switzerland called GALAXY, while managing Peter’s studio and maintaining her own design practice. She was his partner in life and in work.

After years of living, traveling and working between Europe, the United States and Central America, Peter Phillips has relocated his working studio to Australia, located in the Sunshine Coast, north of Brisbane. Having found a large acreage property in the foothills behind Noosa, Peter renovated an industrial barn into a large-scale studio and gallery to house his private collection. The Peter Phillips Collection encompasses six decades of work, spanning from large-scale paintings to mixed-media collages to lithographic prints and sculptures, which will be unveiled to the public as part of a two-day event on May 18th & 19th, 2019 during the Noosa Food & Wine Festival, also coinciding with the artist’s 80th Birthday. The artist’s collaboration with Happy Socks will launch at this event, in celebration of six decades of Peter Phillips.

POP ART PIONEER

A forefather of Pop Art, British artist Peter Phillips now lives in the Noosa Hinterland where he is unveiling a Restrospective Exhibition of his work, staged in his large-scale new studio gallery in time for his 80th birthday. 

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.

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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.

This Popular Pop Artist Is Showing Up On Our Doorstep This May!

His career has spanned over 60 years and numerous continents, so it’s no surprise that prolific British Pop Artist, Peter Phillips is extremely well versed in his artistry. After living and working in the USA and all through Europe, Phillips now resides in the sunshine spot that is a piece of art all on its own: Noosa. And what better place to showcase his work than the Noosa Food and Wine Festival this May?

To inaugurate his newly constructed studio gallery that is a must-see for art-lovers in the Asia Pacific, Phillips will be hosting two special events as a partnership with the Noosa Food and Wine Festival – which also coincides with his 80th birthday!

POP! Pop Art, Bubbles and Canapés will take place on Saturday 18th May, with contemporary canapes and cocktails crafted by local chefs and mixologists. Attendees will learn about the history of Pop Art, meet the man behind the art himself, hear stories of his creative career and be the first to see the retrospective exhibition!

On Sunday 19th May, the event titled Progressive Pop will take place, where guests will devour a six-hour course degustation menu artfully prepared by chef Josh Lopez. Each course will be paired with a glass of wine and accompanied by rare artworks from Phillips’s collection, creating a lively environment for both culinary and creative lovers!

The events over the weekend will present an exclusive first-look at the retrospective exhibition Phillips will be hosting all-year-round at his studio, as well as a short documentary on his life. With critiques from TIME Magazine and The New York Times doting Phillips as an industrious craftsman and celebrated contemporary artists, we’re certain the exhibition will be nothing short of extraordinary.

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