Thursday, February 22, 2024
Artists by Artists
We invited some of the art world’s most talented to create portraits of some of Hollywood’s most fabulous. Delving deep beyond the oft-photographed visages, these artists bring to their subjects a unique depth of perception. Their art goes places a headshot could only dream of.
MARGOT (2024)
CHARCOAL CHALK AND PASTEL ON GREY TONED PAPER
SUBJECT: MARGOT ROBBIE
RYAN (2024)
CHARCOAL CHALK AND PASTEL ON GREY TONED PAPER
SUBJECT: RYAN GOSLING
Richard Phillips
Artist Richard Phillips debuted his first celebrity portraits at the apotheosis of the paparazzi era. And there were no doubt some sent to capture the opening of his 2010 exhibition at White Cube gallery in London. The show’s title, “Most Wanted,” simultaneously distilled the sentiment of that moment while prophesying its swift downfall with the dominance of the camera phone. A frozen slice of the 2000s celebrity fanaticism, the exhibition marked an important body of work for an artist who’d achieved his pop cultural consciousness via sallies into the entertainment arena: a cameo on Gossip Girl, a guest spot on Jeffrey Deitch’s early reality show, Artstar.
It was a continuation of the question that first propelled Phillips to fame: Where is the place for careful, labor-intensive painting in a culture with an insatiable hunger for and an ever-steady supply of images? Phillips had started off this inquiry by painting images of the pornography of his youth–which was now infinitely available via the internet. If Andy Warhol was interested in disconnecting the person and the emotion from the image, then Phillips’ goal was to restore those connections. He wanted to create paintings that held all the desire and obsession that the advertisement wants to mask. He wanted to bring the human back into focus and showcase the absurd pressure put on top of these individuals to be idols.
For TheWrapBook, Phillips returned to this iconic series to catalog the actors behind this year’s most impressive performances. Executed more than a decade after the originals, they read differently. In our self-taped age of “candid” photography, the red carpet imagery feels formal, perhaps even uncomfortably (a register Phillips like to occupy). Rather than darkly humored, they feel nostalgic, like us, and that is the most startling thing of all. —Kat Herriman
CILLIAN (2024)
CHARCOAL CHALK AND PASTEL ON GREY TONED PAPER
SUBJECT: CILLIAN MURPHY
EMILY (2024)
CHARCOAL CHALK AND PASTEL
ON GREY TONED PAPER
SUBJECT: EMILY BLUNT
BRADLEY (2024)
CHARCOAL CHALK AND PASTEL
ON GREY TONED PAPER
SUBJECT: BRADLEY COOPER
CAREY (2024)
CHARCOAL CHALK AND PASTEL
ON GREY TONED PAPER
SUBJECT: CAREY MULLIGAN
BARRY (SALTBURN)
(2024) CASEIN AND FLASHE ON DYED CANVAS
SUBJECT: BARRY KEOGHAN
Theodore Boyer
When Theodore Boyer moved to Los Angeles from New York a decade ago, his painting practice was steeped in abstraction that invoked everything from ancient archaeological sites and JPL satellite trajectories to GPS mapping systems. But after the pandemic forced everyone indoors, the Seal Beach-born artist returned to his first love: figurative painting, which he’s shown everywhere from Istanbul’s Sevil Dolmaci Gallery to Praz-Delavallade in Los Angeles. “My paintings are allegorical and deal with the unconscious mind, they’re about where your psyche attaches to the tangible, and that’s how I approached these films,” says Boyer, who painted Rosamund Pike and Barry Keoghan from Saltburn. “When painting these actors I was sort of putting myself in their shoes, entering the psyche of the characters and recontextualizing them within my psychedelic milieu.”—Michael Slenske
ROSAMUND & BARRY (SALTBURN)
(2024) CASEIN AND FLASHE ON DYED CANVAS
SUBJECT: ROSAMUND PIKE, BARRY KEOGHAN
GIVE US OUR FLOWERS (2024)
MIXED MEDIUM WORKS ON PAPER
SUBJECT: COLMAN DOMINGO
Guy Stanley Philoche
Haitian-born modern artist Guy Stanley Philoche immigrated to Connecticut when he was 3 years old. As the middle child of three boys and coming from a family of sports enthusiasts whose passion he didn’t share, Philoche turned to art as his calling. While remaining close to his Haitian roots, he now lives in New York City. For the past 15 years, Philoche has been attracting international attention with his work and his impressive roster of solo shows. As an artist, Guy’s palette is strong and sophisticated. His layering technique has created a body of work so richly textured that one can hardly hold back from reaching out and touching them. Here, Guy turned his eye to Colman Domingo in Rustin. “My work exists because these people exist in me,” he says. “As an artist, it is important to listen to their stories. The intention is to celebrate and give people recognition, love and respect every day. Too often we wait to honor people when they are gone. We should be saluting and toasting the people in our lives today and give them their flowers on this side, while we can. The paintings are appreciation and giving flowers now to incredible people.” —Claire Uhar
UNTITLED (2024)
OIL AND BLOOD ON CANVAS
SUBJECT: LEONARDO DICAPRIO, LILY GLADSTONE
Fawn Rogers
Raised in the wilds of Medford, Oregon, Fawn Rogers has utilized photography, painting, film and sculpture to explore everything from her Cherokee heritage to the dichotomous nature of human life in the heart of the Anthropocene. The L.A.- based multimedia artist’s work has been shown internationally at Galerie Marguo in Paris, Nicodim Gallery and Lauren Powell Projects in Los Angeles and Hong Kong’s K11 Musea. “My ancestors on both sides of my family—my mother is Cherokee, my father is Jewish—have been victims of genocide,” says Rogers. “So I took this opportunity to paint the leads in Killers of the Flower Moon—in blood and oil—because the story is about genocide, greed, power and blood for oil. Native Americans are by far the most underrepresented people, and this speaks to the atrocities still happening in America and all over the world today.” —Michael Slenske
NORA AND HAE (2024)
ACRYLIC ON CANVAS
SUBJECT: TEO YOO
NORA AND HAE (2024)
ACRYLIC ON CANVAS
SUBJECT: GRETA LEE
Aryo Toh Djojo
“My work is steeped in ufology and reincarnation—my next show touches on the idea of a past life or where we came from within the spiritual realm— so it was serendipitous that I was asked to paint Greta Lee and Teo Yoo,” says Aryo Toh Djojo of his portraits capturing the Past Lives stars. The Indonesian-American artist’s dreamy airbrushed paintings investigate Southern California architecture, car culture, Hollywood celebrity, vacant David Lynchian landscapes and extraterrestrial encounters and have been the subject of several solo shows in recent years at Stems Gallery in Paris, Sow & Tailor in Los Angeles and Perrotin Tokyo. He’s also exhibiting new work in L.A. as part of Wilding Cran Gallery’s 10th anniversary show. As with all of his other paintings, you’ll find a UFO floating in the background of these portraits. “Maybe this is the characters watching themselves,” adds Toh Djojo. “From a past life.” —Michael Slenske
UNTITLED (2024)
OIL ON CANVAS
SUBJECT: MARK RUFFALO
Salomon Huerta
Born in Tijuana, Salomon Huerta grew up in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East L.A. before earning his MFA at UCLA. His paintings—from portraits of models and rock stars and the backs of anonymous heads made with palettes invoking fashion magazines to psychological still lifes depicting his father’s revolver next to afternoon snacks brought to him as a child—have been exhibited at the Smithsonian and the Whitney Biennial and reside in the permanent collections of LACMA and MOCA. For the inaugural issue of TheWrapBook, the artist painted Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo from Poor Things and “looked to Frida Kahlo’s surrealist paintings as a guide,” says Huerta, who is currently exhibiting a suite of his fantasy poolscapes at Harper’s Chelsea in Manhattan. “The painting of Mark was more of a collaboration with the book, but for Emma, I used Frida’s self-portrait with her monkeys.” —Michael Slenske
UNTITLED (2024)
OIL ON CANVAS
SUBJECT: EMMA STONE
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