Conor Harrington

Conor Harrington is an extremely talented Irish painter and street artist who has garnered worldwide recognition for his dramatic and mesmerizing artworks which wonderfully fuse together various street art motifs and rather ambitious realist painting. His prolific large-scale murals, canvases, and opulent print editions of complex and overwhelming compositions, which masterfully blend classic imagery of great masters with contemporary elements, represent some of the most compelling contemporary art on display today. Harrington’s loose brushwork, seemingly unfinished imagery, dripping paint, and graffiti flourishes provide an antidote to his sometimes sentimental evocations of duty and honor.

Conor paints pictures with brush and paint, representing ordinary and rigid boundaries between male and female and how Western view tends to transform women into stereotyped objects. A sensational lucid dream rather than actual reality, Conor creates visual poetry. His oil on canvas and ink on paper paintings trace emotionally intense and dramatic portraits of human faces, nude figures, or even a group of people. Through his astonishingly beautiful paintings, Conor is portraying “real” contemporary people and situations with truth and accuracy, including all the unpleasant or sordid aspects of life.

One of Harrington’s longest-serving themes is that of the modern male identity and its place within the gender crisis of the 21st century. By addressing this narrative, he employs the styles of Baroque and Renaissance painters, to map historical stories into present-day events. Originating from Cork, Ireland, and a former graffiti writer, Conor Harrington today works from his east London studio, but he is very active all around the world, from Dublin, US, and the UK, to Norway, Spain, and the Bethlehem Wall.