Alicia McCarthy

17 aug 201815 sep 2018

Alicia McCarthy’s energetic works weave together colour, pattern and occasional lyrical or understatedly profound phrases. The artist is drawn to the discarded. Digesting the city’s landscape, ambivalent everyday items sheared from their original intent are appropriated into intimate art objects. Abandoned wood is scouted and repurposed as a foundation. McCarthy applies house paint, coloured pencil, liquid graphite and spray paint transforming recycled materials into art objects with a folk, DIY and punk aesthetic. Most of the new works combine various abstract gestures while maintaining a very physical presence. They are subtle, radiant, complex and emanate an immediate and honest energy.

Alicia McCarthy is one of the core figures of what is now known as “The Mission School” together with Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, Ruby Neri and Chris Johanson. Named after San Francisco’s Mission District where the artists lived and worked in the 1990s when it was still a pre-gentrified low-rent neighbourhood. The group came together around independent music, skateboarding, graffiti, community driven projects, queer politics and zine publishing. They favoured found materials to paint and draw on and turning them into sculptures and installations. Influenced by their rough urban surroundings, the natural beauty that encapsulates San Francisco and their mutual interests, they started making art that carried a myriad of sentiments, simultaneously upbeat and downbeat, abstract and figurative, harsh, humorously tender, repetitive, old fashioned and avant-garde. The group never worked as a collective and never sought out a collective identity, but their aesthetics and attitude gained popularity in San Francisco and spread, influencing and inspiring creators around the world. The group became part of the seminal traveling exhibition Beautiful Losers (curated by Aaron Rose and Christian Strike), now also a documentary of the same title.

Kilde: V1 Gallery