Barry McGee, Reviews, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco

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Barry McGee

SFGate
June 26, 2023

Ok, Those of you who already read the caption above, think I'm a total goof... well, I'm kind of a goof. I almost completely missed a show by one of my favorite artists because I wasn't looking out for suspicious names that could actually be aliases for Barry McGee. McGee had a show earlier in the year down in L.A., and used the name Ray Fong, and now he's back as Robert Pimple. His work generates such a stir and complete buying frenzy that galleries and maybe McGee himself have resorted to disguising his true identity, but of course when you see the work it's undeniably his. Anyhow, the group show is at Gallery Paule Anglim and it includes a couple of other folks that rock too: Clare Rojas and Rigo 23. It's a great show, so get down there and have a peek.

Juxtapose
July 5, 2023

We finally made it over to Gallery Paule Anglim to see Rigo 23's "new large canvases (presented as tarps on the wall) with graphic black-and-white imagery referring to current global events and American culture's distance from them", as well as The Art of Robert Pimple - which you probably recognize as looking a lot like Ray Fong's work, which you may see as strikingly similar to Barry McGee's art (if so, you could be an art detective... they are all one and the same), and Clare Rojas exhibit "Moody Loner" which "features new paintings in her signature gouache technique placing figures in a crisp and colorful landscape. Combining features of cartoon and folk art, her paintings depict sexual role reversals with the male as the object of a critical (and mocking!) female gaze. Rojas blends ironic spice into the expected charm of her visual treats."

Barry McGee - Reviews: Milan
ArtForum
December 2002
by Marco Meneguzzo

FONDAZIONE PRADA

You had to pass through the body of an overturned truck to get into Barry McGee's exhibition, and you then found yourself immersed in a sort of global urban periphery, the terrain in which this young California artist and his imagination operate. It was like crossing to the other side of a mirror, not to a world in reverse but simply one you'd rather not see. Yet this unpleasant parallel universe harbors its own expressive rules and creative and interpretive capacities; and despite the encompassing social entropy, fires of revolt (not revolution) flare up every now and then.

McGee's roots are in the graffiti movement, which began in the early '80s as a way for young disenfranchised artists to affirm their very existence. Their small cry of defiance, a gesture of healthy anarchy, multiplied into millions of tags splashed across the walls of cities around the world and has today perhaps degenerated into an academic ersatz of rebellion. Once the novelty of graffiti wore off, there was a natural exhaustion of the phenomenon, but certain examples could be absorbed into official culture, appreciated and exhibited in museums, "valued" and sold at auction. This decontextualization of graffiti art--the shift from alleyways to galleries--even produced a few art stars, like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat; but the majority of practitioners were left to languish in the obscurity of the art world's margins. Putting up an exhibition of work by an artist like McGee at the Fondazione Prada is symptomatic of what cultural, economic, and political establishments can do to contain an expressi ve force that is pretty much spent but may still have subversive potential. Once again such work has become valued for its novelty, and even its quality, but not its social meaning.

That duly noted, it should be said that McGee bears up very well under this decontextualization because he manages to transform the exhibition space into a stage. He constructs a spatial metaphor for his personal and social reality and represents the world from which his images come, turning the art viewers into actors in an environment. At the Fondazione Prada he created a gigantic, perfectly orchestrated theatrical installation with numerous "stations" and a multitude of narratives. A second semidestroyed vehicle (this time a van) was transformed into a makeshift shack housing a series of drawings done by the artist's father. Opposite, a small plasterboard hut held drawings by McGee's wife. The entire grouping was connected by red walls on which, like exvotos, hung myriad sketches, jottings, and notes, as well as photographs of McGee himself as a child--a labyrinth of images and sensations, almost all emerging from the life of the streets. It is a context that evokes the entire phenomenon of social marginal ization and its artistic and literary expression from Faulkner to the Beat generation and beyond. But a sour note rings out in the form of the often repeated image of a face, which functions for McGee as a sort of latter-day "tag": a character young but already resigned, too unintelligent or unaggressive or perhaps simply too ugly to be able to escape the slums--unlike the artist himself.

Barry McGee at Deitch Projects
Art in America
July 1999
by Edward Leffingwell

In addition to several vast walls figured with graffiti, two sorts of ordinary, oddly recycled containers dominated "The Buddy System," a mind-boggling installation by San Francisco-based Barry McGee. In his solo New York debut, the streetwise artist sometimes known as Twist positioned arrays of mostly half-pint empty bottles around the project space, the labels stripped, the caps intact. He marshaled the tools of his trade by the score: depleted spray-paint canisters, similarly without labels, their metal surfaces burnished to a sheen, were stacked like grenades in this Arte Povera arsenal.

The dourly comic Olmec figures that are the artist's signature and surrogate randomly populated the installation, limned on walls and bottles and rendered large on close-set tiles of oxidizing metal. McGee mounted ranks of the bottles to a rudely varnished wall, framed within a cartouche of pinstriping filigree. On the facing wall, his by-now familiar character crawled along a steel-tiled surface with the enduring stoicism of a penitent, reappearing on red-enameled walls at left and right. Biomorphic forms shaped like hornets' nests intersected with passages of graffiti, which alternated with obliterating strokes of gray paint, the marks together composing an expressive, almost-patterned field. Visitors to the project space vocalized their pleasure as they surveyed the decorative chaos of this chapel dedicated to the studied spontaneity of graffiti. A frequent accolade was "Wow."

McGee's insider checklist of equipment included a jacket fitted with cartridge pockets below the waist to conceal his spray cans; bolt cutters suggesting access to forbidden spaces; a can fixed like a bayonet to a wooden pole and rigged with wire, to reach beyond arm's length. To this he added an assembly of framed and mismatched photographs: snapshots of alleys and their nighttime citizenry, colleagues, buddies, graffiti installations. There were repo'ed signs warning against shoplifting or defacement, including one that asked for the respect and cooperation of "all taggers. Please do not mark on this truck, and do not remove this sign. Thank you." Phat chance.

The "Buddy" of McGee's system seemed to refer to his downtrodden alter egos as much as to the collaborative nature of street painting, where the community of taggers tries to stick together. McGee, however, has been hanging out at the Walker Art Center, where he recently had a gallery to himself, and in the collection of San Francisco MOMA.