Robbie Conal

The son of New York labor organizers, Los Angeles based Robbie Conal began combining painting with his political beliefs in the early eighties. Conal calls his critical and unflattering caricatures of public figures "adversary portraiture." The message is carried in his thick, aggressive, gestural brushstrokes and the body language of the pose, somehow grotesque and darkly comic. Crediting the influence of  another political astute artist, Leon Golub, Conal notes that he paints to expose issues that disturb him: politics, power, and their abuses. To take his message to the mainstream, he reconfigures his paintings with bold, simple texts that are mass-produced and nationally distributed. At first the posters were mounted as informal street actions with strangers. "I made posters and ran around the streets like a midnight maniac, spattering glue in every major city I could on my no-budget, non-scheduled, total loss, rock n' roll poster tours...building up a volunteer guerrilla-postering army as I went." Now his "strikes" are well coordinated volunteer efforts, with posters plastered to every imaginable kind of public surface. Although the posters are vulnerable to attack, graffiti, or removal, Conal views graffiti on his work as "letters to the editor" or spontaneous art "reviews."

bio from "Mapping the Terrain-New Genre Public Art" edited by Suzanne Lacy

contact: www.robbieconal.com