Grandpa Goes to Hollywood

Published for Brad Phillips’s first exhibition with de boer in Los Angeles, a book of paintings that treats the artist’s own life as material to be edited rather than reported.

The show ran from 24 April to 29 May 2021 and was hung in two rooms. Figurative canvases of the artist’s wife, the poet and artist Cristine Brache, filled the main gallery, among them Cristine in My Camo Shirt, April 2020 and Getting Dressed to Meet the Parents, Deauville Hotel, Room 413, Miami, Aug. 2015. Text paintings hung apart from them, in the domestic setting of the gallery’s private viewing room. One of those, No Gods, No Masters, restages Bruce Nauman’s The True Artist Is an Amazing Luminous Fountain (1966) and puts Daffy Duck, hands on hips, in the space Nauman left blank. Titles that read like dated diary entries hang against slogans borrowed from other people, and the book keeps both halves of the argument. Linen over boards, 8.5 by 11 inches, with a dust jacket carrying a painting detail. Edition of 100.

Phillips is a Canadian painter and writer whose first collection of stories, Essays and Fictions, was published in 2019 by Giancarlo DiTrapano’s Tyrant Books. The exhibition worked the way that book does, setting the true and the invented in one voice and declining to say which is which. The library also holds his Mother Nature Mother Creature (Perish Publishing, 2014).