Conor Harrington

Conor Harrington is an Irish artist based in London known for his impressive body of work that graces both streets and gallery walls. His distinctive style, which fuses traditional oil painting and classicism with contemporary street art styles and techniques, serves as the vehicle through which Harrington expresses compelling views on challenging themes facing society today.

Born in Cork, Ireland in 1980, Harrington was drawn to the visual arts as a teenager, when he began tagging and making graffiti on walls in his hometown. In 2002, Harrington graduated with a BA in Fine Arts from Limerick School of Art and Design, beginning his foray into an art career that uniquely straddles both the realms of street art and the gallery world.

Harrington’s practise seems to exist in a world of its own, embracing and indeed thriving on apparent contradictions. Whether on canvas or concrete, his paintings possess the urgency and vigour of street art while also embodying the elegance and naturalism of Old Masters works hung on museum walls. Hyper-realistic human figures are disrupted and deconstructed by impassioned smears and splashes of paint, vivid colours transforming an otherwise subdued colour palette with the Baroque drama of a Caravaggio. Harrington often distorts his own painstakingly produced work by obscuring aspects of it with spray paint, or, more recently, by attacking them with solvent or even fire extinguishers.

Such violent push and pull between creation and destruction, classical and radical not only embodies Harrington’s distinct style but also communicates the inherent symbolic tensions with which his work engages. His 2018 series ‘The Story of Us and Them’ explores the dangers of identity politics, with themes of nationalism and division evoked by symbolically charged imagery such as flags and men in colonial dress. Brash invasions of red and blue paint play out across the canvases, pitting the paintings’ human subjects against each other in an imagined battle of ideals which, with its blurred imagery evoking rapid change and dissolving the boundaries between realistic and dreamlike, demands the viewer get lost in the fray.

Recently, Harrington’s style and techniques have been evolving even further to integrate his street art practice with what he calls his ‘inside’ work. Early in his career, Harrington adapted his practise based on the final context of a work, with his canvas paintings executed slowly with meticulous layering of oil paints in a traditional approach. Later on, however, Harrington began experimenting with applying the techniques he uses for large-scale murals to canvas paintings, executing the latter more rapidly and in a more expressionistic way. The large paint rollers and splashing buckets of loose paint typically used in Harrington’s murals have found their way into his studio practice, bringing an even greater sense of immediacy to his recent ‘inside’ works.

Harrington is uniquely skilled in his ability to bring an undeniable contemporary freshness to images and techniques rooted in Western art history. Merging street art with gallery and museum walls, abstraction with hyper-realism, and historical images with today’s issues, Harrington creates compelling epics for the modern age and forges a world of art that is all his own.