David Robilliard - Contemporary Art Day Sale London Thursday, February 16, 2012 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Friedman Guiness Gallery, Frankfurt
    Private Collection, London

  • Exhibited

    Frankfurt am Main, Friedman-Guiness Gallery, Life Isn’t Good, It’s Excellent, 1989
    New York, Hirschl & Adler Modern, David Robilliard (1952–1988), 13 September– 6 October 1990
    London, Royal Festival Hall, Life Isn’t Good, It’s Excellent, 1992
    Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, A Roomful of Hungry Looks, April–June 1993
    Dublin Royal Hibernian Academy, Joyce in Art, 2004

  • Literature

    M. Bloem, ed., David Robilliard: A Roomful of Hungry Looks, exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1993, p. 59 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Poet and painter David Robilliard’s intoxicating combination of
    words and images make for a unique vitality and freshness. The art
    historian and curator Rudi Fuchs has described Robilliard’s style
    as “want[ing] to express his feelings succinctly and … not to hide
    behind style or grace, and [his sparingly] drawn pictures give a witty
    yet serious life to the words and phrases they carry and the words
    make the pictures sharp.”
    Of his use of the name Joyce in this particular work, gallerist
    Sebastian Guinness has stated that “David definitely had a
    relationship with the works of James Joyce, however, as with all
    Robilliard paintings there is a very London gay pun … Joyce being a
    reference to Joyce Grenfell and a host of other iconic figures from
    the post-war gay scene. This was about the art of vocabulary and the
    malleable quality of language, something that he found in Joyce’s
    Ulysses and Thomas Pynchon. We should remember that his medium
    was poetry” (Freidman Guinness Gallery, Frankfurt, 2003).

133

Get Your Revolver Out Joyce

1988
Acrylic on canvas.
184 × 182 cm (72 1/2 × 71 5/8 in).

Estimate
£15,000 - 20,000 

Sold for £18,750

Contemporary Art Day Sale

17 February 2012
London