10.20 — 11.18.2023
Anthem, Arena, Sanctuary
Joe Koppal
facilitated by Perry Shimon
Closing Reception, November 18th, 2 PM
Lauren Powell Projects is thrilled to present Anthem, Arena, Sanctuary, a solo exhibition of paintings, sculptures and chairs by Joe Koppal, twenty years in the making, facilitated by Perry Shimon.
‘The lady that was trying to get me to do tricks for older women at church would leave her ocelot with me and it would attack you or hide under the bed unless you fed it tranquilisers in hamburgers.’
Joe Koppal mentioned this once in a rather offhand way. If you spend a few minutes talking with him, you’ll likely hear something as unusual.
Anthem, Arena, Sanctuary invites you into the world of Joe Koppal, looking at works produced in West Marin and Los Angeles over a span of twenty years. Koppal has been developing a singular language of painting and sculpture for the past 50 years; a global and postmodern vernacular of signifiers and motifs that coalesce in a distinctly Californian register of late Capitalocene anomie.
Joe doesn’t have a cell phone or many friends left alive. There’s a bird he calls Tweety that comes to his house to visit. There was a raccoon he called De Kooning that would come by for a while too. His living room is filled with art books and design magazines. A few guitars, a television and a lot of his own art.
‘Chop wood, carry water’ Joe said once describing his practice. He is truly a person of routine. Each day he goes out to his studio, with a journal of sketches, and spends the day realizing the works that feel most pressing. He uses modest materials, sourced from the local art supply stores and Home Depot, and arranges them into a visual language of painting, sculpture and furniture.
The show runs October 20th through November 18th 2023 and is open Thursday, Friday & Saturday, noon-6pm, or by appointment.
Joe Koppal is a lifelong botanist and artist. After leaving the Haight in ‘71 he moved to a small Northern California town. Over the years he developed an extraordinary language, articulated through painting, sculpture and design. A decades long involvement with psychedelics and autodidactic pursuit of art education has energized his distinctive style. Themes of ecological devastation, rapacious capitalism, religion, and colonization, commingle with a parade of art historical references. A recurring set of personal hieroglyphs appear to Koppal in dreams and find their way from his journals to his paintings, sculpture and the recombinable installations he refers to as tableaux.
Koppal’s last showing in Los Angeles sold out at The Street & the Shop, an independent arts fair presented by writer and curator Michael Slenske, with his work placed in prominent collections.
