Philip Coyne (b. UK, 1989) is an artist, writer and educator living and working in the Netherlands, whose work enacts a poetics of social life: this is to say that he thinks about, writes about and attempts to produce work though the forms of production endemic to both our social lives and social, or relational, life in general. Using sculpture, text, drawing and painting, he makes work about the historic processes of enclosure and individuation that separate us from each other and the world around us.

Within his practice, large 2d works that make use of scale and densely figurative compositions, are interspersed with smaller often more abstract sculptures and drawings. These larger works weave together depictions of urban wasteland; allegories from premodern literature or moments of social unrest; and the history of local non-monumental public art to think about the forms of creativity that manage to slip through the cracks of enclosure or regulation. More broadly these works focus on questions of social embedding, circulation, visibility, and how to dislodge the individual as the assumed addressee of contemporary art. In turn, the smaller works take a very different approach to a similar set of question by focusing more explicitly on the artwork as a contained receptacle of social forces. Whether this is within their own material or affective ecologies; their ontological status as artworks; or in relation to the process of extraction enacted in their production.

While Coyne’s work is built upon a dense research and theoretical practice, which is exercised most straight forwardly in his writing, the artworks do not draw from the visual traditions of conceptual art, nor do they attempt to simply explicate the research base. Rather, they incorporate this base at the level of subject matter and methodology, and attempt to build up an aesthetic vocabulary of conviviality. Using eros, generosity and a very serious cuteness as visual strategies, his works echo the affective vocabularies, or structures of feeling, that particular subcultures produce.

Coyne graduated from Leeds Beckett in 2012, The School of the Damned in 2014, and from the Fine Art MA at the Sandberg Instituut in 2018, where he subsequently taught for 6 years. Recent written work has focused on Sylvia Wynter and her notion of Man; outline a non-Liberal notion of time/space; the different socialities of burial mounds and Land Art; and an erotics of friendship