Barry McGee In Conversation with Veronica Roberts | Berggruen Gallery

On the occasion of 'Old Mystified', McGee’s first solo exhibition at Berggruen Gallery in 27 years, McGee sat down for a conversation moderated by Veronica Roberts, Cantor Arts Center Director, Stanford University.
A prominent artist to emerge from San Francisco’s Mission School, and often known by his graffiti monikers, R. Fong and P. Kin, Barry McGee's works are both in homage and conversation with the Bay Area’s urban culture. Shaped by the underground graffiti, skate, and DIY-art scene of the late 90s and early 2000s, his works draw on the Mission’s history of public art, sign painting, and American folk art. Laden with graphic motifs and geometric abstraction, his signature caricatures with drooping eyes, etched lines, and a vibrant color palette of reds, oranges, greens, and pinks are instantly recognizable. McGee's career as a painter, printmaker, and mixed media artist centers on social activism, focusing on subverting societal stigmas towards marginalized and outsider groups through his work.
McGee prioritizes an ethos of experimentation, self-teaching, and community building in his practice while utilizing the gallery as an experimental space, often not planning his installations but letting them unfold spontaneously during the installation process. McGee is known to bring works in on bikes, with friends, he paints walls and hides objects - to him even a solo-exhibition can be truly collaborative, to embody his belief in compounding worlds and breaking down hierarchies. In his exhibitions you can see a working artist immersed in his environment, incorporating found objects such as tables, trash, broken bottles, and historical ephemera. A truly interdisciplinary artist, McGee’s works of photography, painting, drawing, sculpting, and tagging all converse with each other to convey a visual language that probes contradictions - one that asks the viewer to reconsider the boundaries between lowbrow and highbrow, joy and chaos, beauty and disgust.
McGee learned printmaking at a letterpress shop on 3rd and Townsend while completing a Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting & Printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991. He was the recipient of the SECA Art Award San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and was featured in the Documentary Beautiful Losers. McGee’s first solo exhibition with Berggruen Gallery was in 1997 marking this show a 27-year homecoming. Since then he has become an internationally acclaimed artist, showing at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, The Watari-um Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, The Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museo de la Ciudad de México, Mexico City, Mexico, Lyon Biennale, Lyon, France, La Triennale di Milano, Italy, The Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark, Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, SFMOMA, and The UC Berkeley Museum of Art and Pacific Film Archive. In addition to galleries, and museums, his work can be seen on streets and trains all over the world.
Barry McGee: Old Mystified, September 27 - November 7, 2024. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and previews are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone at [phone] or by email at [e-mail].