Joe 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. After leaving the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco in 1971, he migrated north, to a secluded, coastal town in West Marin.
Over the years, Koppal has developed an extraordinary visual 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 Themes of ecological devastation, rapacious capitalism, religion, and colonization, commingle with a parade of art historical references.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 re-combinable installations he refers to as tableaux. Koppal’s recent solo exhibitions include those at Lauren Powell Projects, Los Angeles, and The Street & the Shop, Los Angeles, an independent arts fair presented by writer and curator Michael Slenske.