Barry McGee

This catalogue documents Barry McGee's 2002 exhibition at Fondazione Prada, one of the first major European museum presentations of an artist who emerged from San Francisco's graffiti and street-art scene into international gallery and museum contexts.

Published by Fondazione Prada with an essay by curator Germano Celant, the book surveys McGee's installations of tagged surfaces, geometric abstraction drawn from op art and sign-painting traditions, and clusters of small found-object paintings. It also documents his recurring cast of drawn figures, hunched, sorrowful men rendered in his own hand and that of his collaborators and alter egos.

McGee (b. 1966), who also worked under the tag name Twist, trained formally in printmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute while remaining active as a graffiti writer. His exhibitions typically blur the two practices, filling gallery walls floor to ceiling with clustered imagery drawn from urban signage, folk art, and skateboard culture.