Joel Daniel Phillips is an American portrait artist who is convinced that portraiture has the power to enable empathy across temporal and spatial distance. Phillips strives to explore the personal and societal histories etched in the world around him. His portraits’ subjects and motifs are derived from historical images and from everyday life, oftentimes appearing dreamlike and dislocated.

“My process is inherently about labor, and against the modern backdrop of instant, image-driven gratification.”

The work Billy #2 (2016), shown here, is a life-size charcoal/graphite drawing out of the series No Regrets in Life. With this series, the artist created a monument in tribute to the overlooked and underrecognized people he frequently meets on the street. These individuals are no longer just background figures in public space but are shown as the main characters in their own stories.

On loan courtesy of the Gewobag collection.