Arch Connelly (1950, Chicago, Illinois, US – 1993, New York, US) moved into the sphere of East-Village and Patterns & Decoration, that trend which, starting in the second half of the 1970s, in precise contrast to the minimal and conceptual currents established itself in America with its opulent and transgressive, redundant and playful charge, laden with references to the various forms of folk and craft art.
The “hyper decorative” vocation exaggerated to the nth power in that ornamentation of banal and “qualityless” objects belonging to the everyday, also has its roots in the great American tradition of Pop Art. The last “New Baroque” phase leads Connelly to a hyperbole of the ephemeral, to an apology of the theatrical. The result, however, of transforming his painting into a high-class painting that goes beyond the Hollywood-style overload of refinement desired by Pollock and Stella to immerse itself in a fin de siècle atmosphere.
