Ron English

Ron English

Ron English is an American artist born in Dallas, Texas in 1959, a pioneer of urban art and a fan of Culture jamming. Using distorted posters and elaborate technical paintings, Ron English plays with the iconography of multinationals, popular culture or art history like Joe Camel, the McDonalds, Vincent van Gogh or the Mickey Mouse, by staging them in such a way that they are used against the values they are supposed to represent.

From the early 1980s, the artist initiated and participated in campaigns promoting illegal public art. In 2008, he created and broadcast the "Abraham Obama" poster, which mixes the faces of former president Abraham Lincoln and that of the Democratic candidate Barack Obama. Ron English is the subject of Pedro Carvajal’s documentary film Popaganda, which presents the portrait of this artist.

Always looking for the sublime in everyday life and trying to break the rules of a didactic approach to art and life, English offers an alternative universe where nothing is sacred, everything is subversive, and there’s always room for a little good-natured humor.