Adolf Dietrich / Richard Phillips: Painting and Misappropriation: Swiss Institute Contemporary Art | New York, NY

Swiss Institute is pleased to present an exhibition pairing historical paintings by the late Swiss artist Adolf Dietrich (1877–1957, lived in Berlingen) with recent paintings by American artist Richard Phillips (1964, lives in New York). The encounter results in a complex, multi-layered dialogue beyond categorizations.

Adolf Dietrich is characterized as one of the leading Swiss painters of the 20th century and also as naïve artist. Richard Phillips by contrast is a contemporary painter, who pushes the medium to its limits by choice of provocative themes, a unique painting style as well as by the sheer intensity of his gigantic compositions.

Since 2003, Richard Phillips has repeatedly painted after Dietrich, pushing the boundaries of appropriation to the extreme. Instead of painting after a well-known position from modernism (as Sherri Levine did in the Eighties), Phillips selects a painter, whose fame barely crossed the Swiss borders and who was received highly controversially. Rather than questioning whether any art is truly original, Phillips investigates the discrepancy between appropriation and misappropriation.