Phil Vanderhyden is a multi-disciplinary artist, with work that ranges across painting, sculpture, curation, writing, forensic art-making, animation and performance.

Vanderhyden’s work across disciplines emerges from an interest in contrasting modes of attention.

Originally trained as a painter, Vanderhyden’s early work evoked motifs from 20th-century color field painting and reimagined them with processes that expressed a gap in time and technology, creating works that felt familiar, yet meaningfully voided.

A similar approach can be seen in his curatorial work.  In 2011, Vanderhyden began a long project involving the reconstruction of lost works by the late video artist Gretchen Bender.  Looking back at the historical moment of 1980’s media art, Vanderhyden re-staged and refabricated these works - most of which had not been seen since the early 1990's - to reflect upon our rapidly shifting contemporary media landscape.  This culminated in his recreation of Bender’s 50-foot wall sculpture “People In Pain” for the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

Since then, Vanderhyden’s work has focused primarily on 3D animation. His large-scale, immersive animations make use of industry-standard, cutting-edge computer graphics software to create a unifying layer of form.   This layer serves to give resonance to the seemingly disparate visual worlds of horror movies, role-playing games, nineteenth-century theater, fortune telling, product design, disaster movies and casino aesthetics.

His studio work and projects have been exhibited extensively at venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Kitchen, Issue Project Room and The Front International Triennial among others. These projects have been written about in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Artforum, Art in America and ArtNews, among others.