Influenced by his background in the West Coast graffiti subculture, San Francisco contemporary artist Barry McGee moves fluidly between the street and the museum.
Read MoreHis works interrogate the dichotomies between high and low culture, and public and private space, as well as disparities in class and wealth in contemporary America.
Born in San Francisco, McGee gained recognition from the 1980s as a graffiti artist working in the streets of California. He has worked under various monikers, his best known being 'Twist'; other names include Bernon Vernon, Ray Fong, Lydia Fong, P.Kin, and Ray Virgil. His signature motif is a caricature of a man with sagging eyes.
McGee graduated with a BFA in Painting & Printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991. He was key member of the Mission School, an art movement from the 1990s to 2000s based in San Francisco's Mission District. Associated with the Lowbrow movement, Mission School artists were influenced by urban realism, graffiti, folk art, and West Coast skating and surfing subcultures, and often used found objects and non-traditional media. McGee was married to fellow Mission School artist Margaret Kilgallen until her death in 2001.
McGee gained increasing international recognition following his participation in the 2001 Venice Biennale. He has featured in numerous artistic and cultural surveys of street art and West Coast subcultures, including the documentary film Beautiful Losers (2008).
Working in drawing, painting, and installation, Barry McGee employs a visual lexicon of geometric patterns, recurring motifs, and graffiti to point to social and urban issues and realities.
McGee incorporates materials including liquor bottles, spray cans, tagged signs, and scrap materials in his works, juxtaposing the inherently defiant, transient gestures of urban art with high-class consumer culture. Untitled (Bottles) (2000) is exemplary of McGee's bottle work series, consisting of a large cluster of empty glass liquor bottles, each painted with disembodied faces in the artist's signature caricature style.
On the artist's solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center in 1998, Julie Caniglia wrote for Artforum: 'Despite its distinctly downer vibe, McGee's work has a paradoxical yet undeniable vibrancy, a sense of someone who's found his calling in scavenging, documenting, and bearing witness to the urban wild.'
In 2010, McGee and Josh Lazcano (aka Amaze) produced a mural at the iconic street corner of Houston and Bowery in New York's Lower East Side, where murals have been commissioned since 2008. In a self-referential tribute to the street art subculture, McGee and Lazcano covered the 1,300-square-foot wall in hundreds of red tags belonging to various graffiti artists and crews.
In the contemporary art context, McGee is known for his mosaic-like wall installations, such as Untitled (2009), which are made up of tightly clustered, irregularly sized framed images arranged on voluminous protruding substrates or around corners. Imagery includes blocks of colour, candid photographs, geometric patterns, lettering, tags, drawings, paintings, and found materials, such as cardboard.
The 'cluster method' is recognised as an anti-institutional installation tactic—subverting conventional modes of museum display. Provocatively combining dissonant materials, installation methods, and contextual frameworks, McGee navigates the tensions and polarities of class, wealth, and culture in contemporary American society.
On McGee's 2013 survey exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Nuit Banai wrote for Artforum: ' ... His testing of the permeability of the museum's walls opens onto larger issues of leakage between anti-establishment subculture and mass-market pop culture and thus points to the insufficiency of the show's art-historical framework as well as our discourse's beleaguered fixation on institutional recuperation. ... The clincher, of course, is that even as he tries to offer a critique of this very state of affairs, McGee continues to deliver the goods to an art industry that thrives on selling the frisson of the marginal elevated to the pedestal of high culture.'
McGee's later works more subtly reference elements of street art and culture in the domain of contemporary abstract painting. Works such as UNTITLED (2020), Untitled (2019), and UNTITLED (2012) demonstrate a refinement of motifs and patterns in graphic design or illustration-inspired renditions of street art imagery.
Barry Mcgee's work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in both museums and commercial galleries.
McGee has presented solo exhibitions in institutions including the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2013); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2013); Berkeley Art Museum (2012); The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2007); John Kaldor Projects, Sydney (2004); Fondazione Prada, Milan (2002); UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2000); and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1998).
Select solo exhibitions include TAR PIT, V1 Gallery, Copenhagen (2021); Potato Sack Body, Perrotin, Tokyo (2020); The Other Side, Perrotin, Hong Kong (2019); Little Savage, Eighteen, Copenhagen (2018); Barry McGee, Bellport-Brookhaven Historical Society, New York (2018); SB Mid-Summer Intensive, Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (2018); and Barry McGee, Cheim & Read, New York (2018).
Select group exhibitions include Concrete to Canvas: A Celebration of Graffiti & Street Art, West Chelsea Contemporary, New York (2021); Icons & Vandals, West Chelsea Contemporary, Austin (2021); Arrival of Spring, IKON Ltd. Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2021); Dreamscapes, Fort Makers, New York (2020); MINE IV, V1 Gallery, Copenhagen (2020); Concrete to Canvas, West Chelsea Contemporary, Austin (2020); Made in California, Kantor Gallery, Beverly Hills (2019); and NOW & THEN: Beautiful Losers, Alleged Gallery & the 90s Lower East Side, The Hole, New York (2018).
Barry McGee's artworks are held in collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Berkeley Museum of Art and Pacific Film Archive; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The New Art Gallery, Walsall; and Fondazione Prada, Venice.
Misong Kim | Ocula | 2021
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![Contemporary art exhibition, Barry McGee, Everyday Sunrise at Palpan-Gil, Seoul, [Closed] Palpan-Gil, Seoul, South Korea](https://files.ocula.com/anzax/dd/dd7fcfc4-8372-45e6-85f7-dd3e22a1716b_720_400.jpg)
