Alicia McCarthy at Michael Benevento

Artist: Alicia McCarthy

Venue: Michael Benevento, Los Angeles, US

Date: April 6 – May 25, 2024

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Michael Benevento, Los Angeles

Michael Benevento is proud to present an exhibition of new works by Alicia McCarthy. This is McCarthy’s first solo presentation with the gallery.

Alicia McCarthy’s paintings exude energy as bursts, geometric blocks of color, and heavy woven bands. McCarthy’s practice is active and her work is curiously able to hold a spirit of care and community. Moving freely amidst formalism, punk, and abstraction, her compositions are constructed through a repetitive process of mark making. The surfaces she creates are vivid—staging confrontations between storied compositions, novel colors, and characteristic motifs. Highlighting the imperfections of her materials, McCarthy embraces scratches, footprints, drips and splatters in the paintings, working in a way where one mark is no more important than the other. McCarthy’s abilities with color are specific—her coloration imparts affect, yet the forms are open, allowing viewers to enter the work with their own associations. The balance in her work allows for an optimism that only comes from confidence, consistency, and skill.

For this exhibition, McCarthy is exhibiting large-scale paintings, works on paper, as well as murals painted directly onto the gallery wall. McCarthy’s meditative focus and singular vision are a gift to witness. The simplified elegance of an artist who has worked for many years, again and again approaching the canvas, layering marks and giving her attention to all areas of the composition. As a constellation, these works give way to a field of painting which is both flat, dimensional, complicated, and cool. McCarthy generously shares color and form as an interconnected vocabulary.

Alicia McCarthy was born in Oakland, California in 1969. Recent exhibitions include; California Biennial: Pacific Gold, Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, Alicia McCarthy: No Straight Lines, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, Alicia McCarthy + Ruby Neri, BAM PFA, Berkeley, California, SECA Exhibition, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California. She received her B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1994 and her M.F.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in 2007. Alicia McCarthy currently lives and works in Oakland, California.