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Philip Eglin ‘Hands off Berbatov‘

27 June to 31 July 2008

Philip Eglin holds up a mirror to contemporary society to reflect its prevailing interests, its anomalies and contradictions. His subject matter often comes from stories and images circulated through the press or the internet. His creative approach is informed by both high and popular culture; on the one hand he makes reference to artifacts preserved in museum collections, on the other to ephemera, such as plastic giveaways found in cartons of breakfast cereal. His borrowed images may come from photographic reproductions or from drawings made by his two sons.

Religion, football, sex, and associated states of repression, obfuscation and hypocrisy are Eglin's current themes. On the richly detailed surfaces of his ‘buckets’ a range of ostensibly different cultures meet. On one a gathering of Victorian gentlemen seem unaware of the female nude that shares their space. They appear beside a group of scantily clad African women, taken from an Edwardian postcard entitled ‘Native Beauties’. A further image of woman is supplied by his - much enlarged - re-rendering of a Picasso drawing of a prostitute. The objectification of these women is emphasized by the way the identities of most are obscured by Smiley Faces (also a reference to an Essex primary school's recent use of the symbol on its website, allegedly to protect its pupils from the gaze of perverts). From these juxtapositions and presentations of different - yet essentially familiar - contexts, we are led to recognize the ways the female nude has been ‘acceptably’ depicted and to question if anything much changes over time.

Another series of works explore the widespread view of ‘Football as the new religion𔃷. Among these, translucent ‘lithophanes’ take the form of quasi-religious shrines to the new ‘gods’ of the game (such as Beckham, Rooney and Drogba) with each depicted in the crucifix-like pose of their goal celebrations. And on a bucket the hands of the outstretched arms of a footballer are pierced like stigmata, corresponding on the interior surface to the hands of an image of the crucified Christ.

Biographical notes

Born in Gibraltar in 1959, Philip Eglin trained at Staffordshire Polytechnic (1979-82) and the Royal College of Art, London (1983-86). He has exhibited internationally and his work can be found in major private and public collections that include Aukland Museum, New Zealand; Mint Museum, North Carolina, USA; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh; the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. He was winner of the prestigious Jerwood Prize for Applied Arts: Ceramics in 1996.

‘Eglin‘s Etchings’

Juliana Barrett and Tatjana Marsden

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