Barry McGee
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Barry McGee (aka Twist aka Ray Fong; born 1966, San Francisco, California) is a painter and graffiti artist.
McGee rose out of the graffiti art boom in the San Francisco Bay Area during the early nineties. McGee's work draws heavily from a pessimistic view of the urban experience, which he describes as, "urban ills, overstimulations, frustrations, addictions & trying to maintain a level head under the constant bombardment of advertising". His paintings are very iconic, with central figures dominating abstracted backgrounds of drips, patterns and color fields. He has also painted portraits of street characters on their own empty bottles of liquor, painted flattened spray cans picked up at train yards and painted wrecked vehicles for art shows.
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[edit] Influence
McGee was highly influential on the urban art scene that followed in his wake and is most likely responsible for the spread of the popular use of paint drips in urban-influenced graphic design, as well as the gallery display technique of clustering paintings & the increasingly frequent gallery display technique of painting directly on the gallery walls, imitating the intrusive nature of graffiti. The clustered compositions of pictures are based on similar installations he saw in Catholic churches whilst working in Brazil.
[edit] Life
McGee graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991 with a concentration in painting and printmaking. He was married to the artist Margaret Kilgallen, who died of cancer in 2001. The couple had a daughter named Asha.
McGee has had numerous shows in many kinds of galleries and was also an artist in residence at inner-city McClymonds High School in Oakland, California in the early 1990s.
[edit] Controversy
McGee was involved in a controversy regarding the Adidas Y1 HUF, a shoe for which he provided the artwork. This gave rise to a protest campaign by some Asian-Americans who claimed that the picture on the shoe's tongue depicts a racist stereotype. The artist stated that the drawing was a self portrait of himself as a child. Barry McGee is half Chinese.
[edit] Trivia
Barry McGee also is known by many variations of his TWIST moniker: TWISTER, TWISTY, TWISTO & more.
McGee is connected with the Asian hipster magazine Giant Robot.
[edit] Quotes
- "The more I learned about the art world, the more my interest in what was going on outside of it increased, I didn't have any desire to bring graffiti inside the school's walls or anything."
- "Compelling art to me is a name carved into a tree. Sometimes a rock soaring through a plate of glass can be the most beautiful, compelling work of art I have ever seen."
[edit] See also
[edit] Further reading
- Barry McGee. 2002. Barry McGee: The Buddy System. ISBN 0964853035
- Barry McGee, Germano Celant, and Miuccia Prada. 2003. Barry McGee. ISBN 8887029210
- Aaron Rose and Christian Strike (editors). 2004. Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture. ISBN 1891024744
[edit] External links
- "Barry McGee" on Art:21, PBS.com, 2005.
- "Barry McGee", UCLA Hammer Museum, 2000.
- "Trains and Trucks with a Twist of Pain" by Eric Nakamura, Giant Robot #9, 1997
- "Barry McGee at Deitch Projects: or, WHY, BARRY, WHY???" by Stephanie Lee Jackson.
- Transit Project Twist gallery
- Barry McGee gallery, Flickr.
