Phillis Ideal
Artist Statement:
My compositions and color palettes evolve during my experiments in the studio, conflating and referencing many art historical movements and tendencies from Modernism to Abstract Expressionism, Geometric Abstraction and Color Field to Minimalism and beyond, creating my own language out of many forms of abstraction. I try to open up visual possibility painting expansively, regardless of the size of the visual field, laying out broadly described areas of color, painterly gesture, defined contour, combinations of texture, collage, and geometrically defined hard edges. My paintings layer and illustrate a visual history of the medium’s evolution while simultaneously concealing it, transforming the image into something altogether new, combining formal structures with chance elements. “In their confluence of the hard edge and the painterly, Ideal’s paintings evince a sophisticated grasp of American postwar painting-sophisticated enough to add to, even renew, it while remaining distinctive and up-to-date.” Peter Frank-American Art Critic and Curator
Artist Biography:
Phillis Ideal (b. 1942, Roswell, NM) earned her BFA at the University of New Mexico Albuquerque in 1964 and her MFA from the University of California Berkeley in 1984 where she studied with Elmer Bischoff and Peter Volkos. She has had gallery representation by Linda Durham, Chiaroscuro and David Richard Galleries in Santa Fe, Grapestake Gallery in San Francisco, Rosenberg and Kaufman in NYC and has had over twenty solo exhibitions, including the De Young Museum (San Francisco, 1975), New Mexico Museum of Fine Art, (Santa Fe, 2021), Roswell Museum of Art (Roswell, NM, 2021),and Wright Contemporary (Taos, NM, 2023). She has shown in Otranto, Italy, Berlin, Germany, and Paris, France and was awarded a British School Residency in Rome (2011). Her academic experience includes teaching at University of California (Berkeley), San Francisco State, Sarah Lawrence, and the Brooklyn Museum.
AAA:
Member Since: 2000
Committee: Development
