BARRY MCGEE: TALK TO NATURE
Lehmann Maupin announces Talk to Nature, San Francisco-based artist Barry McGee’s first presentation with the gallery. McGee subverts traditional artistic definitions and material hierarchy by inviting viewers into an organic and exploratory encounter with both art-making and community-building.
June 22 - August 16, 2024
In this presentation, McGee approaches the gallery as an experimental environment, building an immersive world through works on canvas and paper, sculpture, and historical ephemera, infused with his signature color palette and recurring motifs that have long been associated with his multifaceted career.
Over more than three decades, McGee has gained international recognition for his distinctive style, challenging the stigma associated with graffiti and assemblage practices and affirming their role as powerful mediums and as vehicles for public storytelling and communication. McGee emerged as a prominent figure in the Mission School.
Envisioning the city as both canvas and muse, McGee has long utilized graffiti as a means of artistic expression and activism. His works probe consumer culture and commercialism in twenty-first-century America, often juxtaposing anarchic graffiti with reproduced billboards. McGee’s tight-knit creative community prioritized an ethos of self-teaching and information-sharing as means of resisting traditional art systems and structures—sentiments that remain at the core of the artist’s practice today
McGee’s practice strikes a balance between chance and collaboration with his surroundings, creating work that reflects the oxymoronic nature of modern urban life. His artistic process often incorporates found objects and materials sourced from his immediate environment.
Across the exhibition, McGee’s works are dynamic in form—some protrude from gallery walls, while others take the form of furniture pieces, paper machè objects, and shaped canvases. Each work responds to the next, eliciting a sense of specificity in place, time, and thought, creating a space where McGee’s internal and external worlds coalesce.
Geometric patterns, facial motifs, reds, pinks, oranges, and greens generate harmonic consistency throughout the works on view. McGee’s diverse visual components merge to shape the collective identity of the exhibition, and in turn, the exhibition offers a nonhierarchical space for communal gathering and fellowship.