Barry McGee
Born in 1967 in San Francisco, CA.
Lives and works in San Francisco.
For Barry McGee, the city is a place of expression and inspiration. As an adolescent, Barry McGee tagged buildings, bridge piers, and metal doors with his signature TWIST. His personal and identifiable style of graffiti, immediately made him a recognized figure in the graffiti community. Since graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991, Barry McGee has led two parallel artistic lives: painting for art galleries, and continuing clandestine street graffiti. Filled with energy and despair, humour and melancholy, his work deals with the troubles of urban life and the threat of economic recession. The image of a man’s head appears obsessively on his canvases or within his installations as an iconic figure resembling a cartoon character, alternately serious and funny. For Barry McGee, graffiti is not an antisocial, destructive act of vandalism but a form of encrypted communication, a “street dialogue” in which the environment becomes the subject of an infinite flow of coded messages and interferences.
Barry McGee