Barry McGee

One of America’s most innovative contemporary artists, Barry McGee, will launch Melbourne’s latest multi-genre contemporary art space, the Meat Market Arts Hub in North Melbourne. His exhibition opens on Thursday 28 October and features a number of installations, video, sculpture and drawings and covers the whole range of the artist’s work to date.

McGee is one of the few artists worldwide to show in both leading galleries and at prestigious Biennales, while still remaining true to his subculture roots. His first ever showing in Australia is the latest in a long line of Kaldor Art Projects, which since 1969 has presented the best of ground-breaking international contemporary art in Australia.

Barry McGee is an art school graduate also known by his street name Twist. He has been working on the streets of his native San Francisco as a graffiti artist since the mid 1980s. McGee quickly became famous within the subculture for his innovative combinations of text and image and artfully shaded spray-paint work. His images continue to endure on walls, mailboxes and other surfaces worldwide.

McGee’s work has received international recognition in prestigious art contexts such as Venice Biennale (2001), the Liverpool Biennale (2002) and Rose Museum, Boston (2004), and acclaimed for its vital, unpredictable characteristic edge. The Sunday New York Times recently wrote, “By combining exceptional talent and canny contrariness, Mr McGee manages to bring graffiti into the gallery without undermining its authenticity, or his own.” (11 July 2004)

"My work explores the sometimes humorous ills of contemporary city life. I combine graffiti, drawings, and found objects together to create installations that try to capture the overload of the senses that one might feel walking down the street of any one of our fine American cities," said Barry McGee.

In great demand as one of America’s most innovative artists, McGee was invited by Kaldor Art Projects to undertake a major exhibition in Australia.

Barry McGee’s bold and expressive multimedia art is the ideal choice to showcase the diversity and potential of the Meat Market Arts Hub as a versatile, edgy, and accommodating art space.

“The newly opened venue is ideal for displaying ground-breaking contemporary art and is a strong, distinctively open space, as opposed to a museum setting,” said John Kaldor, founder of Kaldor Art Projects.

Pressetext

Barry McGee opens Melbourne's Meat Market
presented by Kaldor Art Projects