Bob and Roberta Smith

Last updated

Bob and Roberta Smith
Bob and Roberta Smith (34077811670).jpg
Brill in 2017
Born
Patrick Brill

1963 (age 6061)
Education University of Reading
Goldsmiths College
OccupationArtist
Spouse Jessica Voorsanger

Patrick Brill OBE RA (born 1963), better known by his pseudonym Bob and Roberta Smith, is a British contemporary artist, writer, author, musician, art education advocate, and keynote speaker. He is known for his "slogan" art, is an associate professor at the School of Art, Architecture and Design at London Metropolitan University and has curated public art projects such as Art U Need. He was curator for the 2006 Peace Camp and created the 2013 Art Party to promote contemporary art and advocacy. His works have been exhibited and are in collections in Europe and the United States. Brill co-founded The Ken Ardley Playboys and hosts the Make Your Own Damn Music radio show.

Contents

Life and work

Patrick Brill is the son of landscape painter Frederick Brill (1920–1984), head of the Chelsea Art School from 1965 to 1979, and his wife, the artist Deirdre Borlase. [1] He has a sister who is a psychiatric nurse, Roberta. [2] He graduated from the University of Reading [3] [4] and received a scholarship during that time to The British School at Rome. [5] He then obtained his Master of Arts at Goldsmiths College, London. [3] [6]

Brill is married to fellow artist and Goldsmiths College alumna, Jessica Voorsanger, [6] also a contemporary artist and lecturer.

Brill was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to the arts. [7]

Careers

Art

Taxy (1999) by Bob and Roberta Smith, a work from the Cab Gallery Cab Exterior - 'TAXY' Bob & Roberta Smith.jpg
Taxy (1999) by Bob and Roberta Smith, a work from the Cab Gallery

Brill is commonly known as Bob and Roberta Smith in his artistic career. [3] The pseudonym has been retained from the short lived period when he worked with his sister Roberta. [8]

Smith paints slogans in a brightly coloured lettering style on banners and discarded boards of wood and exhibits them in galleries of contemporary art across the world. The slogans are usually humorous musing on art, politics, popular culture, Britain and the world in general and they often support his activist campaigns, such as his 2002 amnesty on bad art at Pierogi Gallery, New York. [9]

Noted for sign painting, Smith also makes sculpture using cement, as in his 2005 Cement Soup Kitchen at Beaconsfield Gallery, London. [10] A sculpture he proposed was shortlisted for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. [11]

[Smith] grew attracted to postures of amateurism and failure. His more recent work has suggested an interest in the utopian impulse of art as an agent for social change, although this often seems hedged with doubt or irony

Morgan Falconer [12]

In March 2005 he was commissioned to curate a series of five public art projects in the Thames Gateway housing estates of Essex. The projects were collectively named Art U Need and were documented in a diary-format book by Smith in 2007. [2] [13] Writing of a launch event in "glittering Notting Hill Gate" (i.e. in fashionable and central Kensington), Lynn Barber said of Smith: "It was a startlingly unsuitable subject for such a glossy audience, but he held them spellbound. I see him as a sort of Ian Dury of the art world, someone who keeps on trucking, doing his own thing, making absolutely no concessions to fashion or marketability, but generally giving pleasure to everyone who comes across him." [2]

A feature documentary about the work of Bob and Roberta Smith, Make Your Own Damn Art: the world of Bob and Roberta Smith, directed by John Rogers, premiered at the East End Film Festival in 2012. [14] [15]

In 2013, he was on the Museum of the Year selection panel. He is on the Tate board as an artist member. [3]

In October 2021, Brill contributed to World Wildlife Fund's campaign, Art For Your World.

Speaker, writer and advocate

He has spoken as an advocate for art education and the arts and has been a keynote speaker at symposia and conferences. [3] A recent example of his gift for merging art and politics was illustrated in the 2006 exhibition, "Peace Camp." Smith took part in and curated the show held at The Brick Lane Gallery that explored artists' perceptions of peace. Gavin Turk, Wolfgang Tillmans, and more than 100 other artists were featured. [16] He created a project, the Art Party, in 2013 to make contemporary art more accessible, demonstrate its ability to influence meaningful conversation and political thought. It was launched at the Pierogi Gallery in New York and at the Hales Gallery. An Arts Council sponsored a two-day conference at Crescent Arts in North Yorkshire that year. It brought more than 2000 people who attended discussions of art education in schools and lectures, listened to music and attended performances. [3]

Brill writes for The Guardian . [3]

Educator

Brill is an associate professor at the School of Art, Architecture and Design at London Metropolitan University, teaching undergraduate and post-graduate students. He leads the Master of Fine Arts programme, researches and co-leads with Oriana Fox of the Public Acts studio, and tutors in fine art. [3]

Musician

Brill performs music, often with a group he co-founded, The Ken Ardley Playboys, [3] who had their first 45 released by Billy Childish on his label Hangman Records. Brill hosts The Bob & Roberta Smith Radio Show called Make Your Own Damn Music on Resonance FM. [3] [17]

2015 election

Brill stood in the Surrey Heath constituency in the 2015 general election, under his working name, Bob and Roberta Smith. [18] He won the fewest votes in the constituency, receiving 273 votes (0.5%) and losing his deposit. [19] The seat was won by incumbent MP Michael Gove.

Collections

Published works

Author
Co-author

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wolfgang Tillmans</span> German photographer (born 1968)

Wolfgang Tillmans is a German photographer. His diverse body of work is distinguished by observation of his surroundings and an ongoing investigation of the photographic medium’s foundations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Shrigley</span> British visual artist (born 1968)

David John Shrigley is a British visual artist. He lived and worked in Glasgow, Scotland for 27 years before moving to Brighton, England in 2015. Shrigley first came to prominence in the 1990s for his distinct line drawings, which often deal with witty, surreal and darkly humorous subject matter and are rendered in a rough, almost childlike style. Alongside his illustration work, Shrigley is also a noted painter, sculptor, filmmaker and photographer, and has recorded spoken word albums of his writing and poetry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The New Art Gallery Walsall</span> Art gallery in Walsall, West Midlands, England

The New Art Gallery Walsall is a modern and contemporary art gallery in the town of Walsall, in the West Midlands, England. It was built with £21 million of public funding, including £15.75 million from the UK National Lottery and additional money from the European Regional Development Fund and City Challenge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Snoddy</span> British artist and gallery director (born 1959)

Stephen Snoddy is a British artist and gallery director.

Christian Jankowski is a contemporary multimedia artist who largely works with video, installation and photography. He lives and works in Berlin and New York.

Michael Fullerton is a Scottish artist living and working in London. He is primarily a portraitist and paints in a traditional style.

Jasper Joffe is a British publisher at Joffe Books contemporary artist and novelist who lives and works in London.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tim Lokiec</span>

Tim Lokiec is an artist based in New York City whose 2003 solo debut artworks were praised by The New York Times for their "remarkable visual and emotional intensity". In 2004, he was cited by London's Frieze Art Fair as being one of the world's most exciting artists who were nominated by 200 leading contemporary art galleries in the world. In 2006, the Kantor Feuer Gallery, known for discovering new talent and developing the careers of artists, and ranked as one of the top galleries in the world, held an exhibition of Lokiec's work. His works are also exhibited in the now British government-owned Saatchi Gallery. Lokiec did the cover design for Rich Bowering's 2011 book Big Fire at Spahn Ranch.

BANK was an artists' group active in London during the 1990s.

Oliver Guy-Watkins is a British film director, writer and artist.

Jemima Stehli is a British feminist artist, who is especially known for her naked self-portrait photographs. Stehli lives and works in London.

Jessica Voorsanger is an American artist and academic, living and working in London. She has worked on the "Mystery Train" project for the Institute of Contemporary Arts to make contemporary art more accessible to people with learning disabilities. Her work has been exhibited more than two dozen times with her husband, fellow artist Patrick Brill, best known as Bob and Roberta Smith.

Jordan Wolfson is an American visual artist who lives in Los Angeles. He has worked in video and film, in sculptural installation, and in virtual reality.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cab Gallery</span>

Cab Gallery was an art project from 1999 to 2001 curated by London art dealer Paul Stolper of Paul Stolper Gallery and art collector and London taxi driver Jason Brown. The concept was for art to be exhibited on the outside and inside of a working London taxi rather than a traditional gallery space. As stated by Brown, "It was important to me that when working, the artwork was incidental to the journey of the passenger. I hoped they would notice but it was part of their environment and unexpected. It was also interesting to me to learn which artworks they reacted to. But it had to be a natural discovery."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chisenhale Gallery</span> Non profit art gallery in London

Chisenhale Gallery is a non-profit contemporary art gallery based in London's East End. The gallery occupies the ground level of a former veneer factory on Chisenhale Road, situated in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, near Victoria Park and flanking the Hertford Union Canal. Housed in the same building are two other distinct initiatives: Chisenhale Studios and Chisenhale Dance Space, named also for the road on which they reside.

Phyllis Baldino is an American visual artist whose art engages in a conceptual practice that merges performance art, video art, sculpture, and installation in an exploration of human perception. Her single-channel videos are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix in New York, NY. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Thorp</span>

David Thorp is an independent curator and director. He curated GSK Contemporary at the Royal Academy of Arts and Wide Open Spaces at PS1 MoMA New York, among many others. He was Curator of Contemporary Projects at the Henry Moore Foundation and was also director of the South London Gallery, The Showroom and Chisenhale. He has been Associate Director for Artes Mundi, the biannual contemporary art exhibition and prize at the National Museum of Wales, and following the death of Michael Stanley in late September 2012 was appointed Interim Director at Modern Art Oxford. He was a member of the Turner Prize jury in 2004. Since the beginning of 2005 David Thorp has been an independent curator organising and initiating various projects in the UK and abroad. Thorp has held the positions of International Adjunct Curator at PS1 MoMA New York, Associate Curator at Platform China, Beijing, Curator of the Frank Cohen Collection, one of the most important collections of contemporary art in the UK.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Beaconsfield (gallery)</span> Art gallery in Vauxhall, London

Beaconsfield is an artist-run non-profit art space situated in South London’s gallery district, Vauxhall, England. Spread over two large spaces encompassing a railway arch tunnel and the former Lambeth ragged school, the organisation run a yearly programme of exhibitions. The central focus of the gallery is to “provide a critical space for creative enquiry”, additionally acting as a testbed and primary research vehicle informing theories of curatorial practice and the practice of making art.

Hannah Black is a British visual artist, critic, and writer. Her work spans video, text and performance.

Rachel Jones is a British visual artist. She has exhibited work in the UK at galleries and institutions including Thaddaeus Ropac, The Sunday Painter and the Royal Scottish Academy, and has been artist-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation (2019) and Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art in (2016). Her work is in collections of The Tate, Arts Council England, Hepworth Wakefield, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.

References

  1. Bob and Roberta Smith (30 July 2018). "Deirdre Borlase obituary". The Guardian . Retrieved 6 June 2020.
  2. 1 2 3 Lynn Barber (26 April 2008). "Some day his plinth will come". The Observer . Retrieved 4 January 2014.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 "Patrick Brill (aka Bob and Roberta Smith)". London Metropolitan University & Cass Department of Art. Archived from the original on 10 March 2013. Retrieved 4 January 2014.
  4. "Frederick Brill". Art UK . Retrieved 4 January 2014.
  5. "Smith, Bob and Roberta". Roe and Moore. Archived from the original on 5 January 2014. Retrieved 4 January 2014.
  6. 1 2 Jessica Lack (26 August 2009). "Artist of the Week 55: Jessica Voorsanger". The Guardian . Retrieved 3 January 2014.
  7. "No. 61803". The London Gazette (Supplement). 31 December 2016. p. N10.
  8. Matilda Battersby (24 February 2012). "Inside the artist's studio: Bob & Roberta Smith. One man, two names, a lot of words". The Independent Culture. Independent . Retrieved 17 November 2016.
  9. "Bob and Roberta Smith". Pierogi Gallery. Archived from the original on 16 April 2006.
  10. "Chronic Epoch". Beaconsfield Gallery. Archived from the original on 20 July 2006.
  11. "Fourth Plinth". The National Gallery. Archived from the original on 3 March 2008. Retrieved 12 March 2008.
  12. Morgan Falconer (2 October 2006). "Bob and Roberta Smith". Grove Art Online. Oxford University Press. Archived from the original on 21 August 2008. Retrieved 10 February 2006.
  13. Smith, Bob and Roberta. 2007. Art U Need: My Part in the Public Art Revolution London: Black Dog Publishing
  14. "Make Your Own Damn Art: The World of Bob and Roberta Smith". IMDb . Retrieved 4 January 2014.
  15. "Make Your Own Damn Art: The World of Bob and Roberta Smith". Center for Artistic Activism. 3 June 2013. Retrieved 4 January 2014.
  16. "Culture Now: Bob & Roberta Smith". Institute of Contemporary Arts. 11 January 2013. Archived from the original on 5 January 2014. Retrieved 4 January 2014.
  17. "Make Your Own Damn Music on Your Damn Radio". Resonance104.4fm. 7 November 2008. Archived from the original on 5 January 2014. Retrieved 4 January 2014.
  18. Clark, Nick (3 December 2014). "Artist will run against Gove at the election on culture platform". The Independent. Retrieved 2 August 2022.
  19. "2015 general election results - Surrey Heath". UK Parliament. Retrieved 2 August 2022.