logo
livingroom

decorative bar

biographies


corner Last update of this page: July 27th 2017 corner
Arch Connelly
(12 May 1950 - 22 July 1993) U.S.A.

Arch Connelly

Artist

separator

Arch Connelly was born in Chicago and received a bachelor's degree in 1973 from Southern Illinois University, where he majored in ceramics.

He lived in San Francisco until 1980, when he moved to New York City. Soon after moving to New York in 1980, Arch Connelly became a fixture of the East Village art scene. A series of early solo shows at the influential FUN Gallery led to numerous other exhibitions and critical acclaim. His first solo show was at Artists Space in TriBeCa in 1980. In 1981, he had the first of four solo shows at the Fun Gallery on East 10th Street, one of the best-known showplaces of the East Village art scene.

Arch is best known for using flashy and trashy materials. He consistently encrusted his paintings and sculptures with faux pearls and gemstones, bits and pieces of costume jewelry, paillettes, sequins, glitter and sometimes pennies. His ornate yet ersatz objects can look like jokes about the inflated monetary value of art and may now seem emblematic of the overheated market of the 1980s. But Arch teased other meanings from materials that are typically dismissed as inherently superficial and merely decorative.

Arch clearly understood that his trademark materials are also culturally coded as feminine and faggy. In several small but dense collages, photographs of naked men and gay sex are festooned with pictures of luxe jewelry clipped from magazines. This low-tech ornamentation celebrates hunky male bodies while undermining their aggressive masculinity.

But Arch's star has dimmed since his untimely death from AIDS related complication, at Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan. He was 43 years old and lived in Manhattan.

separator

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/ & http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/

Click on the letter A to go back to the list of names

corner © Matt & Andrej Koymasky, 1997 - 2017 corner