Robbie Conal loves needling the powers that be

"I haven't seen you for a long time," said Shapiro, a photographer and former Santa Monica arts commissioner. "I wasn't used to seeing you out of context. I thought you were just on the side of buildings."

It's the rare artist who's told that he's "out of context" in an art gallery, but then Conal took something of a back road to public prominence. Dismissing art galleries as "fancy stores [that] invest objects with a narcotic effluvia of 'high' culture" 20 years ago, he made his name by making midnight raids on cities from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., plastering walls with his instantly recognizable posters born of political rage -- expressionistic, almost violent, portraits of headline-makers coupled with punny epigrams turned on their heads.

But success has been double-edged for Conal. Even now, most sentient beings older than 35 in L.A. remember his poster of Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker staring blankly above the words "False Profit." But many don't realize that he's a fine artist, not a graphic designer, with a complex body of work that's more diverse than his signature pieces alone and a lengthy track record teaching painting and drawing at USC, UCLA and Otis Parsons School of Art & Design, now called Otis College of Art and Design. A broad survey of his artwork -- about 100 paintings and drawings spanning 30 years -- will be gathered in a career retrospective, "Robbie Conal: No Spitting No Kidding," which runs from Saturday to Nov. 22 at Track 16 in Santa Monica.

An ironic venue for setting the record straight? Not really. The truth is that Conal loves art galleries, always has; he haunted them growing up as a kid in New York the way more typical youth do malls. And it doesn't surprise -- or even dismay -- him that the medium and the message of political posters have overshadowed his identity as a fine artist, despite the images' origins as dense, painterly canvases inspired by German Expressionism.

Turning heads