exhibitions » South London Dreaming

Tom Phillips is an internationally renowned artist who has throughout his long career lived and worked in Camberwell and Peckham.

This exhibition, which marks his 75th birthday, features a wide survey of prints and originals including works that relate to his locality, such as the large autobiographical South London Dreaming, which annotates significant points of place and time, and 20 Sites n Years, an annual photographic documentation of twenty seemingly ordinary locations in a half mile radius of his studio: a work that has accumulated each year since 1973.

Tom Phillips was born in 1937. After studies at Oxford he trained at Camberwell School of Art where he was taught by Frank Auerbach, He then spent several years teaching in art schools while following his interest in new music. He created experimental scores which were performed by the pianist John Tilbury. Among his students was Brian Eno whom he introduced to some ideas that helped develop ambient and generative music. Eno’s album covers include, for Another Green World, a variation of Raphael Revisited.

Also on display are pages from A Humument, whose 5th edition (Thames & Hudson) appears on 24^th May 2012. A Humument began in 1966 when Phillips, on a Saturday morning walk with RB Kitaj, found a secondhand novel for threepence in a junk shop on Peckham Rye and resolved to work on it for the rest of his life. As well as being continuously in print it has featured in various guises, including a commentary to his own translation and illustration of Dante’s Inferno, an opera Irma, a suite of prints The Quest for Irma, and in 2010 as the first artist-designed App for the iPhone and iPad.

GX Gallery offers an opportunity to see prints based on his major exhibition, We Are The People at the National Portrait Gallery in 2007. They are part of his long term artistic engagement with postcards apparent in numerous other works in this show from Oh Miss South Africa, to Sixteen Appearances of the Union Jack, One Bus Two Londons and The Quest for Irma.

Other works particular to the area show Phillips as a draughtsman. In the series Periwinkle Diaries, flowers picked from neighbouring Peckham gardens are drawn from life on seven days each Spring. Of this work, begun in 2006, Phillips says ‘The classic periwinkle flower is an amazing construction. Designed like a ship’s propellor: it is full of energy. With its help I try every year to explore Plato’s cunning Theory of Forms.’

In Peckham: The First Dish, an etching from 1989 Phillips illustrates the first satellite dish visible from his studio window with a minute diary chronicling daily events during the progress of the work.

As well as lithographs, etchings and silkscreens a selection of sculptures is presented, including refractive Wittgenstein and Mallarmé cubes, Lucy Ironworks assembled from fragments of iron found in an old factory, and the ready-made inspired C. LOOPSEEND fabricated by Embassy Signs of Peckham.