Barry McGee Solo Art Show in Tokyo

[Niyusu]

Tokyo's Watari Museum of Contemporary Art in Harajuku is hosting a solo show by Barry McGee. McGee, born in 1966 in San Francisco, was well known by his graffiti name "Twist," among other aliases. The artist describes the big-city experience as a series of "urban ills, overstimulations, frustrations, addictions and trying to maintain a level head under the constant bombardment of advertising." His work is characterized by dazzling colors and forms interspersed with pessimistic and melancholic motifs -- especially his trademark image of a man with a droopy, unshaven face.



It's been thirty years since graffiti stepped off the street to became the darling of the modern art world. With its visual diversity, and despite its defiance of those who viewed it as vandalism, New York galleries came to embrace it during the 1980s in the name of the avant garde. But as Japan's still small-scale graffiti culture only began in the '90s, it has only relatively recently attracted much attention in Tokyo's art world. The Barry McGee solo show in Tokyo shows that Japanese art fans are paying attention now...

Barry McGee Brings Street Art Show To Tokyo | Japan Times

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