PAUL McCARTHY: A&E, Adolf/Adam & Eva/Eve, Drawing Sessions 2020 – 2022 with Lilith Stangenberg

Paul McCarthy’s work probes the darkest currents of Western culture, demystifying its hegemonic structures and refusing to acknowledge the limits of what is acceptable, representable or digestible. His practice operates where cultural consensus collapses: in the territory of repression, obscenity and structural violence.

When McCarthy and Lilith Stangenberg met during the course of a performance, they found themselves alone in a room. McCarthy remarked that the space reminded him of The Night Porter by Liliana Cavani. Stangenberg replied that it was one of her favourite films. That shared recognition was not anecdotal, but foundational.

The Night Porter is a psychosexual drama about domination, starring Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde, which explores the complex relationship between prisoner and jailer, exposing an unresolved and disturbing dichotomy between torturer and victim. Cavani does not present fascism as a closed historical phenomenon, but as a persistent libidinal structure.

Taking these premises as a point of departure, McCarthy made Night Vater (2019) with Stangenberg. The film develops the relationship between Max, a Hollywood producer, and Lucia, a young aspiring actress. The work revisits central obsessions in McCarthy’s practice since the late 1960s, when he read The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich: power dynamics, repressed trauma, sexuality as a political field, and the aesthetics of totalitarianism as a form of desire.

The appropriation of universally recognisable figures — executioner, victim, father, daughter — functions as an immediate archetypal anchor. Yet the aim is neither illustration nor direct denunciation, but a deeper excavation. At a historical moment in which the word “fascism” has lost semantic density and become an abstraction, McCarthy proposes it as a metaphysical tendency inherent to the human condition: the desire to be dominated, to submit to vertical authority. Fascism as a machine of desire.

From this conceptual core emerges A&E, Adolf/Adam & Eva/Eve, Drawing Sessions 2020 – 2022 with Lilith Stangenberg, a multidisciplinary body of work encompassing drawing, performance and film. The project originated in a series of un-rehearsed drawing sessions — conceived as performances — between McCarthy and Stangenberg, in which drawing does not function as preparation or illustration, but as a direct record of a live action.

The title A&E, Adolf/Adam & Eva/Eve, Drawing Sessions 2020 – 2022 with Lilith Stangenberg operates as a deliberate convergence of references: Adolf & Eva, Adam & Eve, and Arts & Entertainment. These overlapping layers generate an unstable framework in which historical figures, mythological archetypes and contemporary cultural systems coexist without crystallising into fixed identities.

Within this structure, McCarthy performs a character named Adolf — a figure that simultaneously evokes Hitler, Adam and a grotesque embodiment of authority — while Stangenberg plays Eva, oscillating between Eva Braun, the biblical Eve, the actress, the daughter and the lover. Identities remain deliberately unstable, constantly mutating through performance.

The drawings emerge directly from these sessions, produced while both participants perform in character. The works on paper register raw, expressionistic marks made under conditions of disruption, dialogue and improvisation, foregrounding process over resolution.

Throughout this body of work, identities do not stabilise; they contaminate one another. Adolf defines himself as American; Eva is identified as a German actress, directly echoing the real biographies of McCarthy and Stangenberg. Familial and sexual roles overlap: Adolf refers to himself as “Daddy”, while Eva calls herself “daughter”. The figure of Eva further incorporates visual and cultural references associated with Marilyn Monroe, allowing American and German identities, history and entertainment, to continually exchange positions.