Tom Phillips: Sacred and Profane

Tom Phillips is one of Britain’s leading artists and cultural figures. His influence on the fields of fine art, literature, music composition and curatorship is the result of a career spanning more than 35 years. Sacred and Profane, at the South London Gallery, is the most important exhibition of the artist’s work since the RA’s major retrospective in 1993. This exhibition and another at Dulwich Picture Gallery are being held to mark Phillips’ 60th birthday. The choice of two of South London’s most renowned gallery spaces for these exhibitions reflects the artist’s strong links with the district where he still lives and works.

The exhibition will contain Golgotha and Women’s Work, two of Phillips’ acclaimed pieces from the Royal Academy’s 1997 Summer Show. The exhibition also contains new work exploring Phillips’ major concerns: the relationship of the spiritual and the material, and the confrontation of the idées reçues of formal culture.

Two new quilt pieces entitled Manpower and Had I the Heaven’s Embroidered Cloth will be on public view for the first time, in a wry approach to the pre-millenium status of gender roles and the stuff of male fantasy. Also included are new versions of the notorious The Peeler, and of Phillips’ wrought-wire crosses combining religious texts with the transcendent simplicity of the cruciform shape.

Tom Phillips
Sacred and Profane