Patrick Brill
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Patrick Brill, better known by his pseudonym Bob and Roberta Smith (born 1958) is a British contemporary artist. After studying at Reading and Goldsmiths College Brill launched his career. The possibly apocryphal story is that Brill devised a number of artist personas and types of work and then sent them to commercial galleries, the first to gain a positive response was Bob and Roberta Smith.
Patrick Brill paints slogans in a unique 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, politic, popular culture, Britain and the world in general and they often support his activist campaigns, such as his 2002 amnesty on bad art at Perogi Gallery, New York. As well as sign painting, Bob and Roberta Smith also makes sculpture using cement, as in his 2005 Cement Soup Kitchen at Beaconsfield Gallery, London.
"[Patrick Brill] 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: "Bob and Roberta Smith" Grove Art Online. Oxford University Press, [2/10/06], [1]
Patrick Brill also performs music, often with a group known as The Ken Ardley Playboys.
