Tom Phillips

Phillips was Vice-Chair of the Copyright Council from 1985 to 1989. He was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1989 and was Chairman of the Royal Academy’s Exhibitions Committee from 1995 to 2007. He curated the Royal Academy’s exhibition 'Africa: The Art of a Continent' (1995) which subsequently travelled to the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. He was appointed a Member of the Royal Society of Painter Etchers and Engravers in 1987 and an Honorary Member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in 1999. He is an Honorary Fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford, Leeds University (Bretton Hall) and the London Institute as well as an Honorary Member of the Royal Institute. He served as a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery (1998 - 2006 ) and a Trustee of the British Museum (1999 - 2006). Phillips was made a Commander of the British Empire for services to the Arts in the 2002 Birthday Honours list.

Perhaps his best known work is "A Humument": an ongoing project on which Phillips has worked since 1966. It is a transformation of W.H Mallock’s Victorian novel "A Human Document" published in 1892 into a treated novel; each page has been re-worked highlighting certain words of the original text to create a new story and illustrating that story over the original text.

‘I took a forgotten Victorian novel found by chance. I plundered, mined and undermined its text to make it yield ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents and surrealist catastrophes which seemed to lurk within its wall of words. As I worked on it I replaced the text I stripped away with visual images of all kinds.’

Phillips is turning 75 in 2012 and is working as hard as ever, with a 5^th edition of ‘A Humument’ being published in May (by Thames & Hudson), a new solo show of original work in London, and well as exhibiting no fewer than 5 new print editions at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

click to close