Patrick Brill, better known by his pseudonym Bob and Roberta Smith (born 1963) is a British contemporary artist.[1]
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Brill graduated from University of Reading, Brill was awarded a scholarship at The British School at Rome while still an undergraduate. Brill followed this with a MA at Goldsmiths College, London.
Brill devised a number of artist personas and types of work and then sent examples of these to commercial galleries, where the first to gain a positive response was Bob and Roberta Smith.[says who?]
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, 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 Perogi Gallery, New York. A recent example of his gift for merging art & politics was illustrated in the exhibition Peace Camp. Bob & Roberta Smith took part in and curated the show held at The Brick Lane Gallery - the show & programme of events explored artists perceptions on Peace. The exhibition featured over 100 artists including Gavin Turk, Rebecca Taber, Wolfgang Tillmans, Abby Jackson and Seb Patene.
Noted for sign painting, Bob and Roberta Smith also make sculpture using cement, as in his 2005 Cement Soup Kitchen at Beaconsfield Gallery, London.[1]
"[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], [2]
Patrick Brill also performs music, often with a group known as The Ken Ardley Playboys, who had their first 45 released by Billy Childish on his label Hangman Records. Brill also hosts The Bob & Roberta Smith Radio Show called MAKE YOUR OWN DAMN MUSIC which is on Resonance FM.
In March 2005 Bob and Roberta Smith was commissioned to act as curator on a series of five public art projects in the Thames Gateway area of Essex. The projects were collectively named Art U Need and were documented in a diary-format book by Smith in 2007.[2]
Patrick Brill teaches at the Sir John Cass Department of Art, Media and Design, London Metropolitan University.
A sculpture proposed by Bob and Roberta Smith was shortlisted for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London [3].
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