DAVID SPILLER TELL ME THERE IS LOVE
104 X 107 CM (42 X 43 INCHES) EDITION OF 95 £5,950
1–17 MAY 2025
4 HAM YARD, LONDON, W1D 7DT 020 3340 8356
INFO@AIR-CONTEMPORARY.COM WWW.AIR-CONTEMPORARY.COM
David was born in Dartford, Kent in 1942. He became engrossed in art and popular culture from a young age. His older brothers would play him projections of cartoons and he would spend hours drawing the characters, as a way of keeping them close to him. After studying Graphic Design at Sidcup Art School and painting at Beckenham School of Art, in 1962 he went on to the Slade School of Art, where he was taught by Frank Auerbach and William Coldstream, and he won the Henry Tonks Prize for Drawing. Throughout his long career he enjoyed huge success with regular solo shows through Europe, the UK and America and his paintings are held in important private and public collections worldwide.
Spiller’s vibrant and playful works blend iconic imagery and song lyrics, intertwined with freehand drawings and spontaneous messages. Sometimes happy, sometimes sad - at the core of each of David’s works are universal messages of love. As well as being visually bold and beautiful, his pieces have the ability to strike a chord - helping us replay moments in our own lives and reminding us of what is really important.
David was always captivated by different printing techniques and interested in the global technological advances it shaped. As a student in the early 1960s and inspired by ‘Pop Art’, David began using ground-breaking silkscreen printing techniques, such as directly transferring a movie poster image on to canvas. He explained that this cutting-edge process was at the time, ‘sneered at’, and that this now respected contemporary art process was not considered to be ‘fine-art’. These early canvases were ‘lost’ for decades, but a few resurfaced from an old basement in the early 90’s. David really loved these treasure trove images and lovingly incorporated them into his paintings. By reworking these printed canvases, scrubbing them, painting and scribbling on them - defacing them like a worn poster that had been graffitied on, he injected his energy into the panel and brought the distressed surfaces back to life. It was the beginning of David’s practice of cutting and splicing images together, allowing
him the freedom to rearrange panels and combine random printed elements together with his own text and images to construct a new powerful painting.
For many years David resisted the idea of making prints from his paintings, knowing that the process of altering the scale and density of line would fail to keep his work’s integrity - he vehemently believed they would lose some of their ‘magic’. Although invariably preferring to paint every element, he understood the possibilities technology offered. Following a meeting with Harwood King Printmakers, they devised an innovative way to digitally remove any existing handwritten work from an image and by overlaying a translucent paper, David could create a new work specifically for print on top. This process offered David the opportunity to choose some of his best-loved characters and iconic images - Disney classics, along with Snowy and Deputy Dawg, allowing him to spend time with them again and add new messages of love. He would repaint areas, cut out and add pieces in, change dot sizes and colours and create new text, welcoming the immediacy of being able to add new song lyrics, scribbles and his signature motifs - these freshly adorned scrawlings and paint splashes would be printed in their actual size. Allowing David to be wilder and freer, to graffiti across his own image; “I make the wall and then scribble on it.”
The innovation of the print technique to bring the handwriting more boldly to the foreground, also changed David’s painting practicethe print process fed into his painting methods. It gave him greater confidence to enhance his own hand-written text or figures on his canvases, and sometimes he would hand-paint them to make them stand out more vividly.
“It’s about making something come alive... I would like people to walk into the gallery and smile... You owe it to people to be a bit crazy... To try things...To take a walk on the wild side...”
