David Spiller

(British, 1942–2018)

David Spiller is a contemporary British painter best known for his graphic, flattened depictions of cartoon characters. “I really want to make paintings that put some magic on the wall,” he has said. “Some of them are straightforward things. Some are wild things. But underneath, it says I love you.” In his work, Spiller brings together a combination of Pop Art influences with the more painterly Art Brut techniques of artists such as Jean Dubuffet. The surfaces of Spiller’s paintings have the appearance of something doodled over, or reused—the faces of Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse are often interrupted by childlike scribbles and scratches. Born in 1942 in Kent, England, he went on to study at the Slade School of Art in London. His work is in the private and public collections of the Morgan Stanley Bank in Frankfurt, Belgacom in Brussels, the Hanwon Museum in Seoul, the Collection UCL Foundation in London, and the Carmignac Gestion in Paris. Spiller lives and works between Berlin, Germany and New York, NY.