Stuart Shave | Modern Art is pleased to present our second solo show by American artist, Barry McGee.

McGee is better known in the street art community of San Francisco by his graffiti tagging moniker ‘Twist’; but with his recent move towards museum and gallery installations, the artist has found a new audience for his work.

McGee is a clear and defiant voice in the persistent underground visual language that narrates the cityscape of San Francisco. His cult status within the street art community combined with a relevant and conscious understanding of his subject matter has allowed McGee to move confidently into gallery and institutional contexts. Using the same energy and frankness seen in his street works, McGee creates intricate environments within the exhibition space that are punctuated with the detritus of city excess. Seemingly disordered masses of chaotic clusters of photos, drawings and paintings, flickering TV screens, upturned cars, trucks, dumpsters, metal panels, electrical cabling, glass bottles, and failing, obsolete computers displaying the animated characters of McGee’s illustrated world, are all individually consumed by the artist’s hand-painted figures and geometric shapes. This sprawling installation is contained within vast and intricate mural-painted walls. Recurrent faces of a community of sagging and disillusioned hobos interrupt any idea of a romanticised view of the reality of the streets.

Alongside his contemporaries, McGee is in constant battle to reclaim personal space in cities that are repainted with the same urgency that faceless commerce swells up around them. McGee describes his working as a way of taking back the surface of the streets and affirming a place in his surroundings. ‘It’s pure chaos, claiming a territory that doesn’t belong to you to state your own identity. It’s like saying: “I’ve got no other way to say that I exist.”…’

McGee carves a soulful and steady line through urban spaces, taking his influence from Mexican muralists, graffiti artists of the seventies and eighties as well as the lyric flow of the San Francisco beat poets. The tight graphic lines of McGee’s drawings maintain a quality of execution that show a practiced and marked respect for the traditional sign writers in the Mission district of San Francisco where he grew up.

Here at Modern Art, McGee will bring the elements of his varied working practices together to create an installation that will embody the spontaneity that has made him one of the most significant and respected graffiti artists to continue working since the early eighties.

McGee’s work has shown in solo shows at The Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Fondazione Prada in Milan. In 2002 he collaborated with ESPO / Stephen Powers and REAS / Todd James to create the installation Street Market for the Venice Biennale in 2003. McGee’s most recent large-scale installation, One More Thing at Deitch Projects in New York closed in August 2005.