Street art is in a funny place. More than 50 years since its invention as the urgent, unruly markings of kids scrawling their names on walls and the flanks of subway cars, it has evolved into a worldwide language and commercial behemoth — from a position outside the mainstream to one in its center. Its progenitors, having reached late middle age, are still searching for ways to push the form forward, even if that way moves beyond its improvisatory and outlaw mode into something tidier and more well mannered.
Two exhibitions of new work by the artists Osgemeos and Barry McGee at the Lehmann Maupin gallery in Manhattan illustrate divergent paths for the aging tagger. Neither represents a significant departure for either artist so much as retrenchments of their well-defined practices, honed for gallery consumption over the last 30 years. But familiarity can be instructive, a map for longevity over novelty. Their work suggests the street is more of a mind-set than a medium.
Their presentations here are linked, but not by style, which could scarcely be more different. Osgemeos (Portuguese for “the twins”) — the Brazilian identical twin brothers Otávio and Gustavo Pandolfo — are enamored with the nascent hip-hop culture of late 1970s New York City: style writing, break dancing and D.J.-ing, which the ’80s had floated down to South America. The brothers began making work as teenagers, bombing fat letters that chugged along like a rail car around their native São Paulo.
Eventually they expanded into baroque murals featuring cartoony humanoid figures rendered in an obnoxiously lurid palette that looked more like a hallucinatory children’s television show than anything happening on the street. (Even now, it’s easy to imagine their characters launching into an extended reverie on words that start with the letter A, say, or listening intently as an adult patiently explains the concept of anxiety.)
McGee, about eight years older at 58, is a product of San Francisco’s countercultural tendencies. He came to tagging as a reclamation of public space from the incursion of commercialism, and as an empathetic witness to those whom that commercialism dispossessed; his work is often punctuated by a slumped caricature with sagging eyes and defeated air.
By 1991 he had a degree in painting and printmaking, and he was developing a practice of highly finished geometric patterning and graphic lettering indebted to a raft of sources, including but probably not limited to Islamic marquetry, midcentury linoleum, advertising signage and early comic book printing.
McGee’s installations have followed a similar blueprint for the better part of the last decade: clusters of pictures of further clusters of visual information paired with custom or deliberately crude displays (found hair formed into letters and scraps of textiles tacked to the wall) that delight in violating standard practices of exhibiting art. His small presentation here, in the gallery’s lower-ceilinged basement level, has the feel of a hoarder’s rec room.
Even with that limited real estate, McGee continues his practice of ceding part of his wall space to younger or lesser-known artists, in this instance Ryan Delaval’s dense, anarchic oil stick drawings. It is both an act of generosity and a punk gesture.
That generosity, combined with a resistance to market forces, has made McGee a cult figure. It has also kept him insulated from the kind of global commercial reach his contemporaries lean into. Osgemeos (pronounced Ohs-gem’-eos), by comparison, painted the Brazilian national soccer team’s Boeing jet and have their imagery translated onto Louis Vuitton products.
More than their graffiti beginnings, the presentations overlap because the artists’ stories do. They met in the early ’90s, when McGee, in São Paulo on an artist residency, was piqued by an Osgemeos mural. In the spirit of San Francisco’s traditions of alternative and nonprofit community art spaces, he bestowed them with a spray-can-modifying NY fat cap and other paraphernalia of the trade, but more important, introduced their work to the international graffiti diaspora, which set their career in motion.
In interviews they speak of him as a kind of benevolent graffiti godfather. Lehmann Maupin does not represent McGee, and so his presence here, at Osgemeos’ behest, functions as both a paying of dues and a flexing of cachet.
To that end, eight collaborative works — small panels featuring the brothers’ denizens bolted to McGee’s obtuse geometries and atmospheric smears — form a wall of disjointed, abstracted family portraits. They’re sweet, a representation of mutual respect, but that’s about the best that can be said about them.
Osgemeos’ pictures hint at a dense cosmology that never fully clarifies. Their characters, with flattened features and eyes that wander toward the outer limits of their jaundiced faces, float in depthless fields of Op Art, perhaps a nod to McGee’s patternmaking, prodding at a contemporary surrealism without ever tipping over into the truly uncanny. Their avatars strap fireworks to their backs and emerge from Botticelli-size clamshells, more Tex Avery than Marcel Duchamp.
The focal point is an altarpiece, flanked by human-scale polyurethane figures and invented celestial deities, like Bologna’s Arca di San Domenico strained through a Memphis design sieve. It’s a tactic the brothers have deployed before, perhaps saying something about Brazil’s history of colonization (São Paulo, founded by Jesuit missionaries, was named for Saint Paul), or perhaps simply stressing the sanctity with which they approach their vision, making literal what Norman Mailer referred to as the faith of graffiti.
Whereas the twins often make references to the graffitist’s lifestyle as a kind of folkloric journey, McGee is more intuitive, scavenging visual elements from daily life and reassembling them in gnomic permutations. In their exhibitions, both try a maximalist approach: paintings, sculptures, installations, vitrines of ephemera, painting or wallpapering the walls, piping in music.
Here the effect is less overwhelming than a primer to their already refined languages. Osgemeos may be holding back for their first U.S. survey, scheduled to open at the Hirshhorn Museum in September; McGee seems careful to be a gracious guest.
These exhibitions succeed most in their tacit acknowledgment of the market’s awkward embrace of graffiti. Because true graffiti relies upon illicitness, very little of it can be invited into a salesroom and still function.
To their credit, neither artist tries. McGee’s studio practice avoids even flirting with its commodification. The best Osgemeos work on view is 10 blocks away on 14th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, two large-scale murals spanning a vacant lot and completed in 2018. A halfway concession at the gallery isn’t one: one of McGee’s simple tags done in black aerosol on a street-facing wall behind Lehmann Maupin’s glass facade, a wry comment on the graffitist in captivity.
Osgemeos: Cultivating Dreams/Barry McGee: Talk to Nature
Both through Aug. 16, Lehmann Maupin, 501 West 24th Street, Chelsea, New York, 212-255 2923; lehmannmaupin.com.
Read More: Beyond Outlaw: New Paths for Aging Taggers
