Basement Bunker: Painted Queen Small Blue Room
Paul McCarthy
Paul McCarthy
Basement Bunker: Painted Queen Small Blue Room, 2003
C-print on aluminum
183 x 122 cm, 186.3 x 123.3 x 4 cm (framed)
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection
Photo: Courtesy the artist | Hauser & Wirth
- Date
- 2003
- Medium
- C-print on aluminum
- Dimension
- 183 x 122 cm, 186.3 x 123.3 x 4 cm (framed)
- Credit
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection
- This artwork is part of the donation and long-term loan from TBA21 to the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.
Details
Basement Bunker: Painted Queen Small Blue Room derives from the performance/installation Piccadilly Circus, for which McCarthy created puppetlike characters, which refer to notable leaders of our time, with oversize masks and clownish costumes that give the figures a comical quality.
The characters’ instinctive and violent actions hint at powerful psychological disorders and related bodily dysfunction expressed through symptoms such as regression, self-destruction, and obsession. The performance is staged as a murderous game of hide-and-seek in a building with preinscribed meaning, namely a bank, which serves as an architectural readymade, or as Robert Storr has described it, “a bastion of respectability seized and vandalized, capitalism’s inviolable precincts violated.”
The naked Queen (Elizabeth, Queen Mum) cowers at the back wall of a blank blue space, completely exposed in an impossible attempt at self-protection and refuge.
