Ron English, one of the most important pop artists in the world today, recognized as a leader of the "Low Brow Art Movement", is back in New York with "Big Picture Pop" at New York's Opera Gallery, November 29th to December 31, 2007. The solo exhibition features the artist's signature mash-up of high and low cultural touchstones, in comic superhero mythology, amidst creatures of his own twisted imagination. English creates a visual language of evolution, with work that speaks to the future as surely as it records, distorts, reviles and reveres the past.
English is best-known for his brazen street art fusing Neo Graffiti with Pop Surrealism. He's sabotaged more than a thousand billboard ads since 1982, and only has one 1984 arrest to show for it. One such subversion, "Jihad Is Over (If You Want It)," with no apologies to John Lennon, was written up in the New York Times, attributed to an anonymous artist. Fusing art and activism, with a healthy disdain for corporate advertising, his art was also utilized in the feature film Supersize Me, which he also appeared in.
The exhibition "Big Picture Pop" features paintings which include two new versions of the artist's ongoing reinterpretation of Picasso's "Guernica," examining the nature of violence and creation mythologies. "Grade School Guernica," featuring the artist's children as models, measures 12x27 feet, one foot taller and one foot wider than the 1937 original.
"Discovering Ron English's new collection is one of my greatest pleasures this year as an art dealer," says Opera Gallery President Eric Allouche. "Every painting comes directly from the inner visions of Ron's brain, and his technique is so beautiful that his brush strokes reflect exactly what he has imagined. Ron reminds us what great art is about: great minds. It is an exquisite pleasure to represent him in New York."
Son of Pop: Ron English Paints his Progeny (9mm Books) employs the artist's two children as models in over one hundred works of art exploring the wild, weird complexities of adulthood through the lens of youthful exuberance.
"If you believe," says the artist, "it doesn't have to be true."
