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.
“Chop wood, carry water,” Koppal once said, describing his practice. A lifelong botanist and artist, he is truly a person of routine, undisturbed and rarely perturbed by modern life, without a cell phone and with an email address he checks “maybe once a month.” His living room is filled with art books and design magazines, a few guitars, a television and a lot of his own art. Each day he goes out to his home 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 and lumber supply stores, and transforms them into a visual language of painting, sculpture and furniture.
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 Themes of ecological devastation, rapacious capitalism, religion, and colonization, commingle with a parade of art historical references.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.