Regular visitors to Phillips Gallery will be familiar with the work of Mark Knudsen, whose paintings of what he has called “the new West” have been a regular presence in its exhibitions for several years. Knudsen’s style—rooted in his years as a designer and illustrator for The Salt […]
How long does Connie Borup tinker with her drawing, shifting and rearranging it, erasing and starting over? Or is it possible that she is lucky enough to find these graceful, elegant lines already composed by nature’s calligraphy? Borup’s recent work, currently on display at Phillips Gallery, continues her […]
All over the world, the story of art begins with Nature: for example, through images of living creatures painted on exposed rock faces. Later, when we moved indoors, art brought the natural world along, to complete a dwelling’s interior space. Artists can preserve the ephemeral, as Connie Borup […]
At first glance, it seems the key to poignant feeling in art is simplicity. Surely Randee Levine’s “Empty Vessels,” one of 18 mixed-media impressions now at Phillips, could hardly be more simple or more striking. Two monochrome items of tableware, perhaps a cruet and a small bowl or […]
The water cycle—traditionally how seawater loses its salt as it evaporates from the ocean, falls as rain on the land, and returns to the sea in rivers—is getting a new level of attention under the pressure of climate change. Hydrologists, the experts on this process, are taking the […]
A visitor to Phillips Gallery during what are becoming their annual showings of the art of Melinda and Joseph Ostraff (see last year’s here) might initially have the impression that the artists work in two formats. One, the more common by far this year, is about the size […]
The main gallery at Phillips is large enough to allow viewing a painting from a moderate distance, a point of view where one current work presents as a charming landscape, featuring a cottage beneath two large trees that resemble tulips. On a clothesline from one of the trees […]
If the only John Wood painting in the gallery was “Shared Experience,” a casual viewer could be excused for thinking him a landscape painter in the Impressionist School. This panel, which is almost twice as wide as it is tall, seems to show a body of water, a […]
The wind was howling, but people were talking about the art, not the weather, at Maureen O’Hara Ure’s packed opening on Friday evening at Phillips, her longtime gallery, where she’s presenting the second set of mixed-media panels she began with on-site sketches while traveling through Spain in 2022 […]
There is one portrait figure by Irene Rampton that stands out at Phillips Gallery. “Mom and Me Out On the Town” differs in the way it observes not the unique look of a sole figure, but includes two women who are as noteworthy for their similarities as for […]
In the hierarchy of values, materials such as ink, marble, uranium, and gold are worth less than the alchemical power of art. And art, in turn, is less valuable than life. This may help explain why the collages of Liberty Blake, though made of paper—and often of discarded […]
Given the level of skilled technique we so often encounter today, it’s not all that unusual to learn that what appeared to be a photograph is actually a painting. The only reason this took until now is that for centuries the masters didn’t have photos to mimic, and […]
What is surely one of the most thought-provoking, suggestive, and yet elusive titles attached to a work of art this season may currently be seen on the walls of Phillips Gallery. As a title, “In Between Dreams” draws much of its power from being an original turn of […]
In commercial advertisements, everything is “new.” The artists who staff Phillips Gallery know only too well that the components of art are rarely all that new, and so they change one letter of that adjective, transposing an e for an o and saying “now.” Or more formally, they […]
“Haptikos #3: (Missoula Blue)” is only one part of an expansive collection of new works by Heidi Moller Somsen, showing currently at Phillips Gallery. But it makes a big point: one that may have surprised even the artist. Technophiles and those who pay close attention to their cellphones […]
In the literally titled “Facing South,” the Utah State Capitol appears not as we usually see it, as the climax of passing through the sprawl of Point of the Mountain, the Jordans, Murray, South Salt Lake, and so on, ascending the cove-like northern end of the Wasatch Front […]
Tom Howard has a gift for renewing language through its association with landscape. His painting, “The Long View,” takes a once-useful phrase, worn out by too many years of metaphorical urging (largely in an effort to motivate listeners to do something people are just not good at — […]