Biography
Philip Riley arrived in London in the mid-eighties to go to art school and remained until the mid-nineties when he moved to New York. His work has been included in important shows such as Wonderful Life at the Lisson Gallery London, the Institute of Cultural Anxiety at the ICA, London and the 2nd Gramercy Art Fair in New York. His recent shows have been in New York, L.A., London and Vancouver. He has also run a public gallery in London called the Centre 181 that showed many now well known young British artists such as Liam Gillick, Matthew Collings, Gillian Wearing and Yinka Shonibare amongst many others. He lives and works in New York and Connecticut.
Statement
My subject matter is science and most specifically those areas of science that help to explain the nature of existence. I have worked in this area since 1989 and despite its current vogueishness I believe that it is important as some current advances in science are causing deep ambivalence in the general public and an anxiety that is reflected in the general discourse. I am deeply interested in many topics such as genetic engineering and the human genome project and their profound implications for the future. At present however I am working on understanding and detailing the nature of the living systems upon which we depend, both inside and outside the body, as they are described by science. My most recent works have been about the origin of life in the primordial soup, the fusion of single celled organisms to make all the creatures we know today, and the protein structures which underlie our chemical make up. My interest has a visual and graphic perspective as well as emerging from intellectual curiosity.
