PAUL McCARTHY

Paul McCarthy (born 1945) is considered one of the most influential American contemporary artists of recent decades. Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, his work emerges from the social friction between discipline, repression, and desire. It is articulated as a direct plunge into a primal state of imagination: McCarthy seeks to take the viewer there as quickly as possible, without mediation or comfort zones.

From his earliest practice, McCarthy set out to break the traditional limits of painting and the art object, incorporating non-orthodox materials — food, bodily fluids, waste — and conceiving the creative process as a physical, raw and primitive experience. His early recognition stemmed from intense and often extreme performances, documented on video and photography, in which the body becomes both a symbolic battleground and a vehicle for grotesque critique of cultural taboos, latent violence and human vulnerability.

Satire is one of the central axes of his work: fierce, unsettling, directed both at systems of power and at those versions of ourselves we prefer not to confront. McCarthy exposes what lies beneath the civilised surface — aggression, absurdity, sexuality, ridicule — and does so on a monumental scale, amplifying the gestures and mythologies of contemporary culture to excess.

From the 1990s onwards, his practice expanded into complex installations and sculptures, employing materials such as fibreglass, silicone, animatronics and inflatable vinyl. In these works, fantasy and reality collide within a delirious space where popular myths, cultural illusions and the collective unconscious intertwine. The result is an experience that is both disturbing and deeply humorous, challenging the viewer’s phenomenological expectations.

The human figure — present or absent — has been a constant throughout his work, whether through his own performances or through exaggerated characters and archetypes that blend high and low culture. These deliberately excessive figures function as critical devices that examine the worlds from which they emerge: Hollywood, politics, philosophy, science, art, literature and television. In this sense, McCarthy’s work locates the traumas lurking behind the façade of the American Dream and places them in dialogue — and in conflict — with the canon of art history.

McCarthy received a BFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969 and an MFA in multimedia, film and art from the University of Southern California in 1973. For eighteen years he taught performance, video, installation and art history in the New Genres department at UCLA, exerting a decisive influence on several generations of artists. He has exhibited extensively internationally, and his work includes collaborations with key figures such as Mike Kelley and Jason Rhoades, as well as with his son, Damon McCarthy.