Works on display

Portraits by Tom Phillips of Harrison Birtwistle, Brian Eno, Peter Hall and the artist's Humument self-portrait at 50 can now be seen in the Balcony Gallery (room 32) at the National Portrait Gallery as part of Artists and Sitters a new display of the 1960-90 collection.
Norwich University College of the Arts will be showing an early work by Tom Phillips Terminal Greys IV-VII (1971-73) which is on loan alongside other works from the Arts Council Collection.
Illustrated here is a new work Beckett Again (oil on panel 2009) which can be seen until 13th December at Compton Verney as part of The Artist's Studio exhibition. The exhibition tours to The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich from 9th February to 23rd May 2010.

Tom Phillips at the Oxfordshire Museum

A Common Reader: Fifty Years of Textual Intercourse.
In his fifty year career as an artist, writer, composer, translator, collector and curator Tom Phillips’s love of language and music have consistently inspired the themes and motifs of his work. This exhibition, a personal selection made by the artist from his own studio, explores his working processes and the marriage of text and image in his work from the 1960’s up to the present.
The exhibition opens on Saturday 24th October and there will be a private view on Saturday 7th November between 12 -2pm. All welcome.
Museum hours are Tuesday to Saturday 10am - 5pm Sunday 2pm - 5pm Admission is free
Oxfordshire Museum, Park Street, Woodstock. 01993 811456

The Black Page at Shandy Hall

Page 73 design. Pencil on paper. 2009. Tom Phillips. Available at auction - see below.

The Black Page exhibition at Shandy Hall celebrates the 250th anniversary of Vols I & II of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. Page 73 of Volume I is a Black Page which marks the death of Parson Yorick. 73 artists/writers have each been asked to create a 'Black Page' for exhibition and sale by auction. All monies raised will contribute to the grant by English Heritage to repair the roof at Shandy Hall. Please go to http://www.blackpage73.blogspot.com/ for details of the exhibition, artists and auction.

A stone Black Page (sculpted by Peter Coates) has been installed on Sterne’s grave in the churchyard of St Michael's church, Coxwold.

Exhibition continues until 31 October. Open every day (except Saturdays) 11am - 4pm

Shandy Hall
Coxwold, York, YO61 4AD
Tel: 01347 868465

Tom Phillips has also contributed a new Black Page 73 quilt to the exhibition.

The Black Page 73 quilt. Sundry silk fabrics and cotton batting, 2009.

The patchwork quilt-top comprises exactly 73 pieces. There are 18 off-white pure silk log cabin pieces around the edge and 55 black pieces in various different fabrics making up the lettered section. The patchwork was constructed by Alice King using the card template technique. Each piece is cut out in card, and the fabric lightly tacked around it to form the flat, irregular patchwork shape. The pieces are then sewn in place by hand from the wrong side with small overstitches before the card templates are removed from the back, along with the rough holding-stitches. The log cabin strips have been sewn on by machine. The quilting stitches (which hold the three layers together) are sewn by Alice Wood, by hand. The log cabin strips and quilt backing are remnants of raw Thai silk which came from the maker of Alice Wood’s wedding dress. The black pieces are from the two Alices' fabric collections, and consist of silk taffeta, jacquard cotton sateen, velvet, flocked chiffon and satin.

The Black Page 73 quilt, details. 2009.

The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival

Tom Phillips will be appearing at The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival this year in conversation with Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art, Trinity College Oxford. This is the first of a new festival event, Conversations with Artists. The event takes place at 12 noon on Friday 18th September in the Marlborough Room at Blenheim Palace and currently tickets are still available from the festival website

1984 at DACS

1984 is an exhibition celebrating twenty five years of the Design and Artist's Copyright Society who are a copyright and collecting society for artist's and visual creators. The exhibition opens on 27th May 2009 in the society's own gallery space, The Kowalsky Gallery 33 Great Sutton Street
London EC1V and runs until 21 August 2009. Other exhibitors include Tracey Emin, Peter Blake, David Nash and Holly Johnson. For more information about DACS visit here.

The Uncommon Reader

The Uncommon Reader is an exhibition that explores the wide-ranging literary associations in the work of Tom Phillips. Featured here are his illustrations to Plato’s Symposium, Ulysses and to his own translation of Dante’s Inferno. Also included in the exhibition are portraits of writers such as Samuel Beckett, David Rudkin and Salman Rushdie, a book jacket design for Iris Murdoch and a fragment of The Library at Elsinore installation. Tom Phillips is well known for works that combine text with image. In this exhibition we see some recent sculptures in wire made from pure lettering that quote from Henry James and from Wittgenstein's Tractacus. Also on display will be a selection from the artist’s enormous photographic postcard archive project, We Are The People, on the theme of readers
The exhibition will be open to the public from 24 October to 15 November 2009 at the Garden Gallery of The Oxfordshire Museum as part of the Art in Woodstock festival.

Printmaking

Two new books on printmaking will feature works by Tom Phillips. Printmakers Secrets by Anthony Dyson is published on 30th May 2009 and Hybrid Prints by Megan Fishpool follows on 3rd June 2009. Both are available from Amazon.

For Robert Burns

A new print by Tom Phillips is exhibited in the group show Inspired which celebrates the life and work of Robert Burns on the 250th anniversary of his birth. The silkscreen and epson print, a newly worked page from Phillips's treated Victorian novel A Humument, is titled For Robert Burns with Best Wishes from Elvis Presley.
Inspired is at the Old Reading Hall at The Mitchell Library, Glasgow. It opened on 4th April 2009 and runs until 20th September 2009.
The exhibition features contemporary works of art alongside several Burns relics. The contemporary pieces are primarily new unseen works by artist's such as Tracy Emin, The Chapman Brothers and Peter Howson.
An online version of the exhibition can be seen here.

Tom Phillips's drawings to The Ashmolean Museum

The University of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum have recently acquired a major collection of drawings by Tom Phillips. These range from his very earliest student drawings made whilst at St. Catherine's College and at Camberwell School of Art to works completed within the last year. A significant part of the acquisition are over a hundred original drawings that made up the 1995 book Merry Meetings, exhibited at The Ashmolean as part of the Tom Phillips Micro Retrospective in the same year. The cover illustration is shown above. Other recent works include a study for the Samuel Johnson fifty pence piece design (2005), a drawing for the Cardinal Newman mosaic now installed at Westminster Cathedral and one of Phillips's stage designs for The Magic Flute at Holland Park last summer.