September 23, 2017
“EMBRACE AND STRUGGLE”
by Conor Harrington
Born in Cork, Ireland, Conor Harrington has come a long way from his teenage “hip-hop nights” tagging and doing graffiti. Now working out of an East London studio he has incorporated inspiration from old masters into paintings that straddle classic and contemporary. Harrington painstakingly sets up photos of subjects for reference and in 2008 began to use historical costumes and re-enactments to reflect and comment on current affairs. In April, 2017, in the weeks leading up to the French election, Harrington joined the lineup of more than 20 international artists who had already participated in the Galerie Itinerrance-curated Street Art 13 project, to paint this 8-story building on Boulevard Vincent Auriol in Paris. Representing the duplicity “historically omnipresent in the world of politics” Harrington purposely does not reveal whether these two figures are locked in confrontation or friendly greeting. @conorsaysboom @galerie_itinerrance