Have you got your purse?

Material

Paint on wood panel; 29 x 82 cm

Dating

2009

About the artist

Bob and Roberta Smith is the pseudonym of the English artist Patrick Brill, a painter, writer, author, musician and art education advocate. He studied at the University of Reading from 1981 to 1985 and then obtained his Master of Arts at the Goldsmiths College, London.
After his studies, he trained as a sign painter in New York. Meanwhile, drawing upon the traditions of signwriting, he uses text as an art form, creating colourful slogans on banners and placards that challenge elitism and advocate the importance of creativity in politics and education.
Brill claims that he devised this twofold artistic alter ego in order to create a more egalitarian platform for art making. Combining the name of his sister Roberta with two names which have historically been very common in the UK, ‘Bob’ and ‘Smith’, Brill playfully presents his works as the products of a purposefully ordinary male and female persona. This unusual move is also characteristic of Brill’s witty, irreverent approach to art.