Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce Talk to Nature, San Francisco-based artist Barry McGee’s first presentation with the gallery. Deeply influenced by urban life, McGee’s interdisciplinary work ranges from graffiti and painting to installation and photography, exploring enduring themes of community, identity, and visual cultures inspired by contemporary consumerism. In this presentation, McGee approaches the gallery as an experimental environment, building an immersive world through works on canvas and paper, sculpture, and historical ephemera, infused with his signature color palette and recurring motifs that have long been associated with his multifaceted career. McGee subverts traditional artistic definitions and material hierarchy by inviting viewers into an organic and exploratory encounter with both art-making and community-building.

Over more than three decades, McGee has gained international recognition for his distinctive style, challenging the stigma associated with graffiti and assemblage practices and affirming their role as powerful mediums and as vehicles for public storytelling and communication. McGee emerged as a prominent figure in the Mission School—a collective of artists characterized by their engagement with the social issues affecting local communities in San Francisco’s Mission District during the 1990s and early 2000s. Envisioning the city as both canvas and muse, McGee has long utilized graffiti as a means of artistic expression and activism. His works probe consumer culture and commercialism in twenty-first-century America, often juxtaposing anarchic graffiti with reproduced billboards. McGee’s tight-knit creative community prioritized an ethos of self-teaching and information-sharing as means of resisting traditional art systems and structures—sentiments that remain at the core of the artist’s practice today.