Hubert Phipps, a sculptor and painter, is best known for his paint pigment drawings and abstract sculptures incorporating various materials including steel, bronze, wood, composites, plaster and glass. An avid pilot, having flown for close to five decades. Phipps often pilots his Airbus Helicopter H-120 down to Palm Beach from his artist studio in Virginia. Having logged 4,000+ hours of flying time, a significant influence on Phipps’ work has come from the view he gets while flying.
Takes Flight seeks to demonstrate unity between Phipps’ explorations of humanity, culture, and production along with the way the body can serve not only as a mechanism to use tools, but also as a tool of artistic production itself.
-
Rocket series
In Rocket, Hubert explores the relationship between materials, design, and physical movement. The object itself may be still, but represents the means by which we all can venture across planes. A hint at his aviation background, Rocket exists almost somew -
Paintings
-
Drawing in the dark: pigment work
Deep End, 2019From an early age, Phipps loved to draw, having learned from looking at his father’s archive of political cartoons, which he’d transcribe. To this day, he still begins most of his concepts in a sketchbook, starting with basic lines and fleshing out forms from there. However, when it comes to putting some of his larger concepts into existence, Phipps takes a less visual approach covering his eyes and eliminating sources of light when he’s working with paint pigment. In Deep End, we see the result of Phipps covering his body in pigment and gesturally creating painting by means of bodily motion. This work represents a progression over time, a moment that existed across dimensions of time and space–– captured and made static for all of eternity. And yet, an impression of motion remains.
-
-
-
Hubert Phipps (b. 1957)
Pinnacle, 2017Pinnacle builds upon the relationship between space and motion. By encouraging us to make sense of the way this gold polygonal structure becomes engulfed by pyramid-like forms. Despite its eternal stillness, it is nearly impossible to experience this work for a person and not be struck by the sensation of having found a projectile caught and captured by the power of earth and weight.
-
Dream Wall
Dream Wall, 2019Steel
72 x 24 x 30 inches -
Africa series
-
Shanghai series
-
-
“Hubert Phipps approaches his artistic practice like a seasoned horologist, in which beauty arises from the marriage of precision engineering and nature’s proclivity for entropy”
- Ty Cooperman
