EVENT PREVIEW
Paintings by Brendan O'Connell at the Fay Gold Gallery within the Westside Cultural Arts Center, April 25-May 31. A reception with the artist, 6:30-8:30 p.m. April 25. O'Connell also will speak 2-3:30 p.m. April 26 at the gallery. Gallery hours: 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays, and by appointment. The Westside Cultural Arts Center is at 760 10th St. N.W., between Brady Avenue and Howell Mill Road. 404-625-9094, www.faygoldgallery.com/.
Brendan O’Connell, the “Warhol of Wal-Mart,” is finally getting a show in Atlanta.
The 45-year-old painter, who grew up in Atlanta and attended St. Pius, was what he calls “an itinerant painter” in 2001, the last time his art was seen in town, and that show was one he had to organize himself, borrowing some space from a friend in a Buckhead post-production studio.
At the time, he had been yearning for the kind of recognition that his contemporary and fellow Atlantan Radcliffe Bailey had already earned, the kind of recognition that allowed Bailey to build a large Bauhaus-style home and studio in Cascade Heights.
“Very few buildings do you come upon and say, ‘Art built that house,’” O’Connell said in a recent telephone interview.
Fortunes change.
Now collected by celebrities and museums and celebrated internationally, O’Connell is catching up with Bailey. On April 25, he opens a one-man show at Fay Gold Gallery, the gallery that sponsored Bailey in the ’90s.
A key to O’Connell’s emergence is his series of paintings of the interiors of Wal-Mart stores around the country, scenes that feature regular people doing the kinds of things people do by the millions: buy stuff.
O’Connell’s pictures are an update of Andy Warhol’s famous Campbell’s Soup can, but O’Connell’s work frequently features whole racks of grocery items — Nutella spread, Utz potato chips, cans of Spam — arrayed in geometric glory, like the lenses in a fly’s eyeball.
The painter worked from photographs that he shot in Wal-Marts, to the displeasure of Wal-Mart managers, who enforced their “no photographs” rule by kicking him out. Then, in 2010, after a show of Wal-Mart paintings in Boston, the giant chain of giant stores began to smile on O’Connell’s efforts. They invited him to photograph wherever he wanted, and even bought one of his paintings.
Today O’Connell’s paintings sell for up to $40,000. (His friend and advocate Alec Baldwin owns several.) Discussion of his work skitters around the topics of American consumerism and the impact of big-box stores, and usually lands on the sensual pleasure of his images.
“He doesn’t think consumerism is a bad word,” Gold said as she began to unpack the 20-or-so paintings for the show, two of them almost wall-sized. “It’s a human thing.”
For his part, O’Connell is thrilled that Gold is back out of retirement. In 2009, Gold closed her Buckhead gallery after almost 30 years in business, then reopened a new space on 10th Street last year. Her gallery is an iconic part of Atlanta, and her influence on the gallery scene is considerable.
“She brought (Jean-Michel) Basquiat to Atlanta in 1985; she did one of Keith Haring’s last shows,” said O’Connell, referring to two former graffiti artists both of whom became enormously successful and influential. “She created the contemporary art market in Atlanta.”
O’Connell is now part of that market. He isn’t building a Bauhaus-style home and studio, but he is fixing up his barn at his rural Connecticut home. “Art didn’t buy it, but art is renovating it,” he said.
