Richard Phillips' portraits combine lurid imagery with a refined, academic painting style. Valuing critique as an intrinsic part of composition as much as canvas and paint, Phillips takes material from sources like soft porn, advertising, fashion, celebrity culture, and Pop art, translating it into glossy, photorealist works with stylized, close-up figures rendered in heightened color or black and white. His provocative oil paintings—such as Frieze, 2009, a realistic representation of a woman on her back with and issue of the art magazine Frieze inserted into her vagina—reveal how images can be used to distort truth and wield power.