ALICIA MCCARTHY

McCarthy’s paintings are characterised by recurring motifs of helices, rainbows, spectrums, and weaves, which together build a distinctive visual language of line and colour, pigment and pattern. The intrinsic structure of these forms is offset by spontaneous inflections of the hand, a nod to McCarthy’s ties to graffiti and her punk and street beginnings. In Untitled, 2020, bands of black outlined in white interlace across a black field, creating a visual play of negative space. The painting’s measured warp and weft is grounding, while surrounding sprays and splatters evoke constellations suspended in an undefined galaxy, providing a contrasting boundlessness. In Untitled, 2020, interlocking rainbows rise from a subtle horizon, each arc of colour unique in its tenor, resulting in a chromatic tension both discordant and fluid. Throughout, McCarthy’s approach remains process-oriented and materially-driven. Graffiti, by its nature, demands precision and intentionality. As McCarthy has noted, “Spray paint is not an easy medium. There’s a line and a gesture and a spray with a spray can that you cannot get with a brush.”

Alicia McCarthy emerged in the 1990s as a key figure in the Bay Area art scene, as part of what is now referred to as the “Mission School” movement, a group of artists who inventively blended graffiti, street aesthetics, punk sensibilities, and folk and craft traditions. McCarthy received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1994 and MFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007. She has exhibited internationally, at the Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, SFMOMA, San Francisco, the Berkeley Art Museum and Film Archives, Berkeley, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, the Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. She has received numerous awards, including SFMOMA’s SECA Art Award in 2017 and San Francisco’s Artadia Award in 2013. Her work is included in a number of public and private collections, including SFMOMA, San Francisco, the Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, the American Academy of Arts & Letters, New York, and the Millennium Iconoclast Museum of Art in Brussels (MIMA), Brussels, Belgium.