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.’
Twist and Street Art
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.
Contemporary Artworks
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.’
Paintings
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.
