Peter Phillips, a founding figure of British Pop Art whose vibrant, iconoclastic canvases helped define a new visual language for Post-War Britain, has died at the age of 86. His family confirmed the news in a statement released on 2nd July.
Born in Birmingham in 1939, Phillips emerged from the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s alongside peers such as David Hockney, Allen Jones, and R.B. Kitaj. It was there, amid a rapidly shifting cultural landscape, that Phillips began constructing the bold, fractured idioms that would become the hallmark of British Pop. While others flirted with figuration or abstraction, Phillips dove headlong into the glossy vernacular of mass media—borrowing, distilling, and recomposing it into collages of machine parts, pin-ups, and commercial signage.
His 1961 work, For Men Only – Starring MM and BB, is typical of this restless visual energy. Towering at over two metres, it layers Monroe and Bardot with lingerie ads, abstract crosses, and a bounding, logo-like hare—all harvested from the flotsam of postwar consumer culture. There was nothing ironic about Phillips’s borrowings: they were equal parts celebration and dissection of a new, hyper-mediated age.
Recognition came swiftly. In 1963, he represented Britain at the Paris Biennale, and a year later, he featured in Nieuwe Realisten at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague—a travelling exhibition that also visited Vienna and Berlin, helping to cement his standing internationally. A Harkness Fellowship soon took him to New York, where his practice cross-pollinated with that of American contemporaries including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist.
Despite the transatlantic success, Phillips remained fiercely independent—his career unfolding not in neat market arcs but in slow-burning evolutions. The mid-1970s saw solo exhibitions at Waddington Galleries in London, followed by a major retrospective in 1983 that toured the UK, from Liverpool to Edinburgh, culminating at the Barbican Art Gallery.
In later decades, his work loosened, embracing elements of Neo-Expressionism. Bolts, springs, and mechanical fragments floated across painted and collaged fields, pointing to a more layered, physical world beneath the high-shine surfaces of earlier years. He never lost his appetite for cultural dialogue: his 1961 painting War/Game was chosen to represent The Strokes’ Room on Fire album cover in 2003, introducing his charged formal language to a new generation.
After relocating to Australia in 2015, Phillips established a studio and gallery in the Noosa Hinterland, where he continued to work and exhibit until the final years of his life. In 2009, he was commissioned to create a work for the 2010 FIFA World Cup—his riotous interpretation of the tournament’s global reach rendered in a flurry of colour and movement.
Plans are now underway to establish the Peter Phillips Foundation, a new body intended to support emerging artists through grants and residencies—a fitting tribute to an artist who refused to sit still and who taught others, by example, to do the same.