BARRY MCGEE
ONE MORE THING
MAY 7 – AUGUST 13, 2005
18 WOOSTER STREET

Deitch Projects is pleased to present One More Thing a
museum scale exhibition of new work by Barry McGee. Deitch
Projects is the third venue of a project that began at the Rose
Art Museum in April 2004 with an exhibition curated by
Raphaela Platow and proceeded to Melbourne Australia in
November 2004 with a project curated by John Kaldor. Barry
McGee works cumulatively folding one body of work into the
next.

The vitality and chaos of the street are always present in Barry
McGee’s exhibitions. The visitor is greeted by over turned
trucks, over flowing dumpsters, and dozens of discarded
Thunderbird and Night Train bottles. Animated drawings
flickering on piles of television sets surrounded by hundreds of 
geometrically painted panels create a cacophonic environment.
McGee brings his own world into the gallery: his community of
friends (an important presence in the exhibition through photos,
drawings, mannequins, and their active participation in the
installation process itself), the haunting presence of hobos and
outcasts, whose sagging faces appear on the walls or cover
empty bottles, the cast-off material from the street where graffiti
artists go out to leave their marks.

The ills of contemporary urban life, with its burden of
homelessness, addiction, and social inequalities can be felt in
McGee’s installations. The intuitive manner in which the artist
works on-site celebrates the act of making and the philosophy of
a “do-it-yourself” culture. McGee’s installations incarnate the
artist’s very personal response to the mass-produced
advertising, corporate logos, and inescapable billboards that
bombard us in the consumer society we live in.
McGee’s street art first appeared under his tag Twist in the
1980s on the walls and tunnels of San Francisco. McGee
draws on a variety of influences, ranging from Mexican muralist
painting, San Francisco Beat poets, and pivotal artistic
forefathers such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and
Philip Guston. Interwoven with his large scale graphics and
comic-strip works are found materials such as empty bottles,
discarded syringes, abandoned cars, old sheet metal, and other
fragments from the street, remade into sculptural installations.
The artist’s sad-eyed characters, painted as large-scale figures
on the walls or as miniature versions on his found objects, voice
the burden of deep existential uncertainty in a culture organized
around economic and ethnic inequality.

Barry McGee’s work has been an essential part of Deitch
Projects’s program since his first solo exhibition at the gallery,
The Buddy System, in 1999. Since then his work has been
featured in the legendary Street Market in 2000, Widely
Unknown in 2001 and Session The Bowl in 2003. The Street
Market exhibition with Todd James and Steve Powers was
included in the 2001 Venice Biennale. McGee had a solo
exhibition at the Fondazione Prada in 2002 and was included in
Drawing Now at the Museum of Modern Art in 2002. The
publication that The Rose Art Museum produced in collaboration
with the artist will be available at the gallery.

FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION CONTACT JASMINE LEVETT AT
212 343 7300 WWW.DEITCH.COM