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)
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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
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Barry McGee

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

Alignment
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Firenze Lai

2013

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

Person with Pillow: Desire, Lust, Fate
© » KADIST

John Baldessari

1991

The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...

Until It Makes Sense
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Mario Garcia Torres

2004

Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...

Untitled (Butterfly)
© » KADIST

Mark Grotjahn

2002

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

Argument
© » KADIST

Firenze Lai

2013

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

Absentia
© » KADIST

Tony Oursler

2012

Continuing Oursler’s broader exploration of the moving image, Absentia is one of three micro-scale installations that incorporate small objects and tiny video projections within a miniature active proscenium...

Converting
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Zai Kuning

2014

Converting is a piece about the Orang Laut, often called Sea Nomads, that inhabited the Riau archipelago...

Untitled (Painting of a Man Leaving in Boat)
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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...

Back to mother
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Zai Kuning

2014

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...

Apartment on Cardboard
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Chris Johanson

2000

Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building...

I am Human, Abstract Foil, No Humans IV
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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...

Men (055, 065)
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Elad Lassry

2012

The black-and-white photograph Men (055, 065) (2012) depicts two similarly built young men – young and slim, with dark tousled hair and a square jaw line – seated aside one another in identical outfits...

Justice
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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...

Untitled (Wheelchair drawing)
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Edgar Arceneaux

2006

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

Gypsy
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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...

The Transparencies of the Non-Act
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Mario Garcia Torres

Mario Garcia Torres discovered the work of artist Oscar Neuestern in an article published in ARTnews in 1969...