Exhibition of the week: Tom Phillips, Flowers Gallery, London W1

 

Adrian Hamilton
Friday 13 September 2013 00:43 BST
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In The Days That Remain by Tom Phillips, 2012
In The Days That Remain by Tom Phillips, 2012 (Tom Phillips, courtesy Flowers Gallery)

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Tom Phillips has been engaged in a kind of mad, off-kilter art-play all his life – he is 76 – a practice involving the refining and revisiting of favourite themes.

The tiny works in this exhibition are described as oil collages, but that makes them sound conventional. Not at all. Their iridescent surfaces resemble stained glass and mosaic.

Looking closer, they are assembled from fragments of palette, hovering between the abstract and the figurative as they play delicate variants on themes of old-masterishness before hinting at the maker's own mortality (In the Days That Remain). So much wonderfully madcap play to a serious end.

020 7439 7766, to 12 October

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