Untitled (The way in is the way out)

2010 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Alicia McCarthy

location: Oakland, California
year born: 1969
gender: female
nationality: American
home town: Oakland, California

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.


Colors:



Untitled (Bird and Eyes)
© » KADIST

Clare Rojas

2008

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...

Untitled
© » KADIST

Barry McGee

Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner...

I am Human, Abstract Foil, No Humans IV
© » KADIST

Chris Johanson

2004

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...

Chocolate Bars, Eggs, Milk
© » KADIST

Elad Lassry

2013

In his composition, Chocolate Bars, Eggs, Milk, Lassry’s subjects are mirrored in their surroundings (both figuratively, through the chocolate colored backdrop and the brown frame; and literally, in the milky white, polished surface of the table), as the artist plays with color, shape, and the conventions of representational art both within and outside of the photographic tradition...

Gypsy
© » KADIST

Pascal Shirley

2006

Gypsy shows an ambivalent scene, in which broken blinds and its unsmiling subject are balanced with the stilllife plentitude of watermelon slices and the beautifully lit nudity of the sitter...

Untitled (Butterfly)
© » KADIST

Mark Grotjahn

2002

This particular drawing, like many of Grotjahn’s works, presents a decentered single-point perspective...

Stowe
© » KADIST

James Welling

2006

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...

Central Station
© » KADIST

Firenze Lai

2013

Central Station, Alignment, and Sumo are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds...

There are veins in these lands, I
© » KADIST

Rodney McMillian

2013

In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point...

Untitled (Painting of a Man Leaving in Boat)
© » KADIST

Chris Johanson

2010

Chris Johanson’s Untitled (Painting of a Man Leaving in Boat) (2010) pictures a canoe drifting toward an off-kilter horizon line, which demarcates the cobalt sea from the cerulean sky...

Untitled (Wheelchair drawing)
© » KADIST

Edgar Arceneaux

2006

Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...

Justice
© » KADIST

Zai Kuning

2014

Justice (2014) presents viewers with a curious assemblage: a wooden gallows with slightly curved spindles protruding from the topmost plank, which in turn is covered with rudimentary netting, the threads slackly dangling like a loose spider’s web or an rib cage that’s been cracked open...

Up All Night, Waiting for the Chelsea Hotel Magic to Spark my Creativity
© » KADIST

Mario Garcia Torres

2010

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...

Oakland Girls
© » KADIST

Pascal Shirley

2006

Like many of Pascal Shirley’s photographs, Oakland Girls aestheticizes a dingy rooftop and a cloudy sky...

Floor, Legs
© » KADIST

Elad Lassry

2013

In establishing a deliberate distance between viewer and subject, Lassry raises questions about representation itself and how all portraits are, in effect, fully constructed objects that only gain meaning once we ascribe them with our own personal associations and emotions...

Argument
© » KADIST

Firenze Lai

2013

Central Station, Alignment, and Argument are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds...

Domes, #1
© » KADIST

Judy Chicago

1969

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...

#17 Pink
© » KADIST

James Welling

2005

#17 Pink is a photogram, a photographic image produced without the use of a camera...

One Must
© » KADIST

John Baldessari

1997

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...