American sculptor, Helen Phillips, was born in Fresno (California, U.S.A). She  studied at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco with Ralph Stackpole (1932-1936). In 1936 she was awarded a Phelan Travelling Fellowship to travel and study in Paris. She subscribed to ideas and practices of surrealist movement. She studied engraving at

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  Biography of Helen Phillips

  American sculptor, Helen Phillips, was born in Fresno (California, U.S.A). She  studied at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco with Ralph Stackpole (1932-1936). In 1936 she was awarded a Phelan Travelling Fellowship to travel and study in Paris. She subscribed to ideas and practices of surrealist movement. She studied engraving at Atelier 17, an experimental intaglio workshop founded by the painter-engraver Stanley William Hayter, which was, at that time, very important for numerous surrealist artists. She got married with Stanley in 1940. During the World War II, they settled down in New-York. Helen Phillips Hayter had her first solo exhibition in 1942 at the New School for Social Research and the first of several joint exhibitions with Hayter at the Sidney Janis Gallery began in 1949.Then they went back to Paris in 1950. They separated twenty years later, in 1970. Concerning sculpture, Helen Phillips worked essentially polished bronze, developing a semi-abstract figuration influenced by Brancusi, surrealists and pre-Columbian statuary. In the forties and fifties, the artist created bronzes with anthropomorphic forms. She made some beautiful engravings, but her experience with gravure was even more crucial for her sculptural development, as it forced her to become conscious of negative space.  In a completely different vein, Phillips produced an extensive series of geometric constructions in wire which explored ideas of modular growth proposed by the American architectural theorist Buckminster Fuller.
  In the sixties, Helen Phillips works began to enter important collections, including those of Peggy Guggenheim, Roland Penrose, and various American museums (Museum of Modern Art New York, Bank America World Headquarters, De Young Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Dallas Museum of Contemporary Art, Albright-Knox Museum,...). Helen Phillips had a growing international fame. In 1967, an accident had stopped her to work for eight long years. When she finally got back to work, the talent and determination were still there, but somehow the creative impetus could not be regained. Helen Phillips died in her house in GreenwichVillage (New York) in 1995 ; she was 81 years old. Her artworks gather more than 500 sculptures (wood, bronze and stone), 150 etchings (on copper, zinc and linoleum) and many drawings.
  
  

  

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