A painting reminiscent of a certain “naive primitivism,” Untitled (the way in is the way out) is representative of McCarthy’s work. Upon first encounter, her abstract colorful compositions resemble somewhat formal nonrepresentational landscapes. However, a closer inspection reveals the presence of a lowbrow style that draws inspiration both from outsider and folk art traditions.
San Francisco-based Alicia McCarthy graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1990s and later pursued an MFA at UC Berkeley. She is now considered part of the first generation of “Mission School” artists, alongside Barry McGee, Rubi Neri, and Rigo23. McCarthy’s early work was largely associated with collective practices, graffiti art, and San Francisco’s active queer punk scene. In line with a trend that rejects the use of consumer goods, McCarthy’s paintings often begin with found materials such as discarded wood panels, on which she paints and draws with acrylic, latex, graphite, or crayon.
Rojas’s two pieces in the Kadist Collection— Untitled (four-legged…) and Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) —are representative of her pictorial style which uses bold colorful blocks of paint and female and animal characters...
Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner...
Concerned with the early history of Singapore, Zai Kuning spent many years living with and researching the history of the Riau peoples who were the first inhabitants of Singapore...
Chris Johanson’s paintings, sculptures, and installations break down everyday scenes and commonplace dramas into colorful forms; the darkest sides of humanity are invoked with humor...
Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building...
Central Station, Alignment, and Sumo are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds...
Domes #1 represents a significant moment in Chicago’s career when her art began to change from a New York-influenced Abstract Expressionist style to one that reflected the pop-inflected art being made in Los Angeles...
Welling employs simple materials like crumpled aluminum foil, wrinkled fabric and pastry dough and directly exposes them as photograms, playing with the image in the process of revealing it...
In One Must , an image of a pair of scissors, accompanied by the words of work’s title, poses an ominous question about the relationship between the image and the text...
Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...
In Up All Night, Waiting for the Chelsea Hotel Magic to Spark My Creativity Mario García Torres constructs and documents a hypothetical scene, situating himself within a lineage of artists and creatives that used to congregate at the historic hotel...
The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...
Converting is a piece about the Orang Laut, often called Sea Nomads, that inhabited the Riau archipelago...
Like many of Pascal Shirley’s photographs, Oakland Girls aestheticizes a dingy rooftop and a cloudy sky...
In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point...
Central Station, Alignment, and Sumo are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds...
Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...
This particular drawing, like many of Grotjahn’s works, presents a decentered single-point perspective...
San Pedro is a seaside city, part of the Los Angeles Harbor, sitting on the edge of a channel...