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Carbone.to
Via dei Mille 38, 10123 Torino
,
Italy
Tel.++39 011 8395911
Fax++39 011 8395916
Hours: Tues.-Sat. 4pm-7:30pm.
Contact: Guido Carbone
E-mail: carbone@carbone.to
web www.carbone.to
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Bob e Roberta Smith "Create your own reality"
In this second solo show at Carbone.to, Bob & Roberta Smith propose a radical new plan for transport in the city of Turin. If accepted, all streets would be fitted with cable cars and people would travel to work from stations in the sky. It is Bob & Roberta Smith’s belief that we don’t have to consume culture because we can make our own reality.
At the end of the ’80s, having won a series of prestigious scholarships in Rome and New York, the figurative painter Patrick Brill reinvented himself as Bob Smith—artist-everyman—without great success. Smith’s debut took place in New York with the distribution of a series of little bags (Lucky Bags), containing the necessary parts with which to make a DIY artwork, for instance a plastic chair and orange paint to create a Van Gogh. Returning to London to complete a Masters at Goldsmith’s College of Arts, where he now teaches, Smith filmed a video documenting his thwarted attempts to find a New York gallery prepared to exhibit his work and later failed his first year exams with an installation in which he covered the entire floor of a room with candies. Roberta came on the scene when Smith started to collaborate with his sister (whose real name is Roberta) and the name remained even after the two stopped working together. Since then, the artist has shown in spaces ranging from the Tate and the Chisenhale Gallery to East London bars, as well as locations in Tokyo, New York, and numerous other European cities. Smith’s works include his cement sculptures—ferries, guitars with seven necks, and vegetables reproduced in mutant shapes—, mountains of orange painted objects, rubber airplanes, and chalk cats with a wild variety of head shapes. Most commonly, however, Smith creates paintings and drawings that reproduce curious slogans and short stories, often containing some grammatical mistakes, such as The Suburbs Are the New Center or Philip Guston Was a Monster . The art of Bob and Roberta Smith is rich in humor and self-irony, but also aspires to a genuine utopian vision: “I want my work to take the form of an open conversation, which gives the maximum possible. The beauty of writing a text is that people don’t have to buy it to experience the pleasure of reading and understanding it, they can live the same emotions by reading a reproduction. I want to get the idea across that people should make their own damn art and that they don’t need me to make it for them.” This vision is reflected in the fact that many of the artist’s works are created with public participation. Bob and Roberta Smith see an artist as someone offering a service, and understand art to be a forum for open dialogue; a parallel world in which ideas can be freely expressed and reality can be reinvented.
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