Now on at HENI Gallery in London is the latest exhibition, The Story of Us and Them from the Irish-born, London-based artist Conor Harrington.
In the early days as a teenager, Harrington was tagging walls after hanging out at hip-hop clubs. Fast forward and he's known for his large-scale studio compositions as well as his huge outdoor murals; his aesthetic blurs the boundaries between a dreamlike state and urban reality. And for his new exhibition, he delves into the idea of patriotism, and the divisions that arise from it using his signature style that sees the abstract sit with the baroque and graffiti-style painting.
For Harrington, the mentality of ‘us and them’ is rising and uses historical portraits of forgotten generals as a conduit with classic patriotic shades of red and blue, exaggerating his idea of ‘us and them’ through various political and cultural tropes. He stages photo shoots on which he bases the scenes in his paintings and utilizes fire extinguishers, brushes, squeegees, hand painting and more to build up an image on his large canvases.
For this series Harrington had two flags made, one red and one blue, which he reproduces in paint and through which he has fictionalized the idea of a nation state to examine ideas on tribalism and patriotism. Harrington is known for his expressionistic oil paintings and murals that draw a fine line between the classical and contemporary, the ethereal and hard realism, and examine themes of masculinity, military history and urban culture.
How many pieces are in the exhibition? There are 12 paintings in total, 8 large full color canvases and 4 smaller black and white studies on birch panel. The large color paintings are very dominating, using mainly reds and blues so I felt I needed to calm things down a little with some smaller monochrome pieces. There is also a big scale difference between the color and the black and whites, the colors being very large and echoing some techniques I use for my murals and the black and white works being a lot more intimate. I like the contrast and feel the black and white works add another dimension to the show.
Describe your aesthetic…Bold, bashy, deconstructed classicism. I’ve always liked art history and while I initially struggled with contemporary art when I was first studying at art college, the Renaissance and Baroque era really captured my imagination. Carravaggio, Velazquez and Franz Hals are some examples of painters whose drama, color and ceremony have informed these new paintings of mine. I used fire extinguishers and large scale brushes and buckets that are more typical tools for mural painting in this new body of work and as I also did a lot of graffiti and street art when I was younger, there’s an immediacy and impatience that comes from painting in the street. My work is a marriage of those two opposing worlds.
The exhibition runs from now until the 12th October 2018.
HENI Gallery, 6-10 Lexington Street, London W1F 0LB
