UK based Irish painter and muralist Conor Harrington was in New York City for the last month with stirring new works inside the gallery space and outside on the street. His signature forms and flying garments were there: indistinctly heroic, Bacon-blurred men in an epic struggle, each wearing richly hued militaristic finery. His dramatic heroes and saboteurs race now across two canvasses on display at the massive Beyond The Streets exhibition in Brooklyn as well as across one daunting five-story walkup on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

The bigger one was probably harder.

Set aside the mercurial, blasting sun and drenching rains and otherwise sticky conditions in Gotham’s gritty summer, Harrington may not have realized that the wall was so huge. Done in concert with the L.I.S.A. Project NYC and the BTS exhibition, Conor crushed it with so much color and dramatic action across the surface (his first mural in NYC in a decade or so) that observers will be stultified by its scale and the mysterious storyline that animates it for a long time to come. The subject of the painting might be of an officer with the British army during the American Revolutionary War. If one were to imagine the piece of art differently by changing the garments and closing our eyes the figure as it is in action could very well be of a matador in a bullring confronting and taunting the bull with his cape. With a background in graffiti and a truly painterly command of the cans, you can imagine the feeling of revelation observers felt as Conor daily revealed this gripping piece in this city of immigrants, of struggle, of dreams.

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