Alicia McCarthy’s abstract and colourful compositions instantly capture the viewer’s attention. From afar, the use of repeated geometric patterns recalls the Op Art of the 1960s. A closer look yet reveals that these optical effects aren’t engineered and calculated by machines with mathematical precision, but the result of a spontaneous gesture. McCarthy’s modular blocks of colours are rather improvised and embodied. By incorporating drips and splashes of colour, she lets her hand run free in her work, boldly embracing vibrant imperfection. Her works are built up from the centre, line by line, with a strong sense of presence.
The bands of colour do not merely form grids; they are interwoven in tapestry-like patterns. Where they intersect and connect, the colours shift. Minimal yet complex, simple yet deeply profound, the works play with our perception. Listen with your eyes, get carried away by the movement and rhythm composed by the lines, like musical scores, listen, and feel the stories they tell. Each line has a distinct character, the relationship between them is social – they interact with each other and us. Telling a visual story of interconnectedness, community, and the complex social structures keeping us together as a whole.
McCarthy expresses a personal and urban poetics, close to the spontaneity of graffiti. Beyond the motif, her work originates in an ongoing experimentation with materiality. Rooted in San Francisco’s active queer punk scene, Alicia McCarthy is one of the central figures of what is known as the “Mission School”, alongside Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, Ruby Neri, and Chris Johanson. Named after San Francisco’s Mission District, where the artists lived and worked in the 1990s, then still a low-rent, pre-gentrified neighbourhood, the group came together around independent music, skateboarding, community-driven projects, queer politics, and zine publishing. Influenced by their diverse urban surroundings, the natural beauty near San Francisco, they began making art that carried a myriad of sentiments: simultaneously upbeat and downbeat, abstract and figurative, harsh yet humorously tender, rooted in tradition yet avant-garde.
https://v1gallery.com/en-usd/blogs/exhibitions/alicia-mccarthy-1
