Jay Phillips; Sculptor Noted for Abstracts

Jay Phillips, a promising artist whose abstract sculptures won him a select but distinctive following, died Tuesday in a New York City hospital.

Steve Lawson, his longtime companion, said Phillips died of congestive heart failure. He was 32.

A recipient of the Los Angeles County Museum’s 1981 Young Talent Award, Phillips, who moved to New York about four years ago, was known for the metal sheets he cut and folded into various shapes. They were done in bold colors and were either free-standing or large wall hangings.

Reviewing some of his output in 1982, Suzanne Muchnic, The Times art writer, credited him with a “swift, sure sense of arrangement that allows him to join bold checkerboards, bright stripes, lattices and circle patterns with painterly gestures evocative of landscape.”

Through his brief career he melded painting and sculpture into brazen grids with patterned sections that even encompassed some Cezanne-like still lifes.

A favored material for his sculpted and formed works was aluminum. He cut wavy edges along the side of his pieces then folded them back over existing patterns which had the effect of playing off a sense of depth against perceptual pulls of shape and color.

One of his better known pieces, “Vases,” was built of half-inch thick sheets of welded aluminum with brushed and incised surfaces.

But in a 1981 show he turned to paper, offering a series of silk-screened prints named for such Los Angeles locations as Hancock Park, Melrose, Hollywood and Bel-Air Gate. Although the material involved was atypical of Phillips’ work, the colors and wide stripes and thick brush strokes were not.

Phillips earned his bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of New Mexico and his master’s degree from Claremont Graduate School in 1979. In Los Angeles he was shown at the Newspace and Roy Boyd galleries.

Survivors include his parents, James and Joan Phillips of Alameda, N.M., three sisters and a brother.