Philip Harris (artist)

Philip Harris (born 1965) won 1st prize in the National Portrait Gallery's 1993 BP Portrait Award for portrait painting with the painting 'Two Figures Lying in a Shallow Stream' generally considered to have been the most powerful and influential painting in the history of the competition. Harris was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to paint Sir Anthony Dowell, Director of the Royal Ballet.

He specialises in realistic figurative painting and portraiture in oils or pencil drawing. Despite the extraordinarily technical approach to his work he is a highly personal, idiosyncratic and expressive artist whose paintings are both disturbing and confrontational.

Art world accolades:

"Philip Harris is a highly contemporary artist extending traditions of realism in British painting." John Slyce (1997) Time Out

"It is an impressive body of work, standing completely outside the orthodoxies of contemporary art practice…. Philip Harris is an example of an artist whose paintings have emerged form the crowd, it now looks resilient enough and authoritative enough to survive far away from the mainstream, chilly and rather fascinating." Charles Suamarez Smith (1997) Modern Painters

"Harris is a genuine, unexpected, formidable talent, grounded in the most ardently traditional technique but with something to say which is totally au courant." Marina Vaizey (1997) Galleries and Museums

"As a piece of brilliant sharp focus observation it gives the lie to any assertion that traditional skills have now been completely forgotten" Edward Lucie-Smith (1995) Art Today

"Beneath the immaculate paint lies drawing, direct onto the canvas almost of Degas' strength and delivery." Brian Sewell (1993) Art Review

"In one self portrait Harris paints his own profile, chin near the ground, his cheeks full as he blows hard onto the grass, every dot of shaved hair, every blade of grass is perfectly, photographically executed, we can even almost see the invisible, the air which billows from the lips. Immaculate." Roseanne Negrotti (1991) City Limits

"The detail of Philip Harris's double portrait of himself and his partner competes with that of trompe l'oeil still life painting and suggests kinship with Photorealism and Gertsh. But Harris's painting is rigorously structured, with the two bodies placed very exactly in their permitted areas and on a carpet of natural and manmade material organised along strict geometrical lines, mostly at 45 degrees to the coordinates of the canvas. Thus a picture in which fact seems dominant to a perhaps discomforting degree takes on a hierarchical, other- worldly character. Norbert Lynton (2000) Introduction to "Painting The Century" NPG

"Harris's microscopic technique and obsessive observation seem to take us way beyond the furthest limits of imagination" "The artist throws himself and his dreams into the rubbish beneath our feet, in this extraordinary work of self exposure and undeniable power". Robin Gibson (2000) "Painting The Century" NPG

" His attention to detail doesn't constrain his deeper purpose, which is to locate dreamlike states of being within an ostensibly real world." William Cook (1991) What's On

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