Cece Philips
- Hayeon Kwak
- May 27, 2024
- 3 min read
Cece Philips is a young painter based in London.
Against the backdrop of a mysterious blue city, the audience is a yet unseen intruder on the convsersations of the women. Women in suits, red, purple, yellow, blue, engage in serious conversation or have a moment to themselves bathed in bright yellow light. Their faces are turned away from the viewer, their gaze indiscernible. This unsettling, subliminal perspective artist Cece Philips produces has attracted the attention of thousands around the world as her art continues to bloom.
Since her debut solo exhibition I See Color in 2021, Philips’s work has undergone much change. Her journey began as a young girl, observing art in her home city of London, holding her father’s hand in art galleries. When asked to reflect on when she “began” art, Philips replied that she couldn’t– art had always been a part of who she was. As a child, she admired her father’s art, and explored with colors and shapes, “kicking herself” whenever her small hands couldn’t imitate the same skilled strokes her father’s did.
Even when she studied history in university and pursued a brief career in advertising soon after, Philips made time in her busy schedule to paint. She fell deeper in love with art at weekly drawing classes on Friday evenings and short art courses. At the beginning of the pandemic, Philips took a leap of faith and left her full-time job to pursue art alone.
As a woman, Philips’s earliest works centred around women and feminity. As a mixed-race artist in London, she later explored her Sierra Leone heritage, painting black figures and using historical events of West Africa as inspiration. As an artist, Philips flourished.
After painting across many mediums, Philips found her true medium in oil painting. The soft texture and richness in vibrancy helped Cece Philips bring ideas from her mind to life on the canvas.
In her recent shows The Night has a Thousand Eyes, Night Walks, and Walking the In-Between, Philips re-creates surreal night scenes run by women. The women speak freely but we never hear them. They gaze intently, but we can never see their subject. Philips’s blue and yellow paintings position the audience as an uninvited, secret observer in the women’s world.
Cece Philips's work inspires a unique sense of comfort, secrecy, and fantasy. The freedom and leisure with which Philips’s subjects enjoy their nightlife contrasts starkly with the dangers women have faced for decades in real life. Stories of assaults, murders, and outdated prejudices about impropriety have kept women from enjoying the dark as completely as those in Philips’s paintings do. In Philips’s work, we see women wearing bright suits bathed in yellow light contrasting boldly against a navy backdrop without any fear, their ambiguous expressions never showing any fear of the dark. This combination of colour, culture, and perspective Cece Philips provides in her most recent collections has drawn worldwide attention. In just two years, Philips has held exhibitions in Ghana, Germany, South Korea, the US, the UK, and the Netherlands.
Philips’s evolution continues at an extraordinary rate. She explores the night scene in a group exhibition Night Light, beauty in chaos through Poetics of Falsification, and unique interpretations of interior spaces through her latest exhibition The Painted Room.
Written by Hayeon Kwak
Links to other resources:
Comments