Lot 133: DAVID ROBILLIARD

Get Your Revolver Out Joyce

184 × 182 cm (72 1/2 × 71 5/8 in).

Acrylic on canvas.

1988

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

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

Friedman Guiness Gallery, Frankfurt
Private Collection, London

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).