Paul McCarthy

Paul McCarthy was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1945 and lives and works in Los Angeles. He earned 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. Working across performance, video, photography, film, drawing, painting, installation, and monumental sculpture, he has developed an influential and provocative practice that offers a visceral, "anti-heroic" critique of American consumer culture, mass media, authority, and the forms of psychological repression associated with domestic life. McCarthy gained international recognition through transgressive performances and "action paintings" in which he used his own body, architectural environments, and unorthodox materials to challenge conventional distinctions between painting, performance, and sculpture. From 1982 to 2002, he taught performance, video, installation, and performance-art history at UCLA. A major survey of his work opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2000, followed by exhibitions at the New Museum in New York and Tate Liverpool in 2001. These presentations helped establish his reputation as a "critical analyst of the American psyche." McCarthy frequently appropriates figures and narrative structures from American popular culture—from Disney’s Snow White and Santa Claus to Hollywood films, television programmes, and advertising—transforming them into grotesque examinations of authority, patriarchal violence, and social hypocrisy. In his performances, food products such as ketchup, mayonnaise, and chocolate often stand in for bodily substances, contributing to the "politics of the mess" through which familiar domestic and commercial imagery becomes unstable and disturbing. Throughout his career, McCarthy has developed a methodology of "demented imagineering," frequently creating elaborate sets and fictional worlds through extended collaborations. Heidi (1992), made with Mike Kelley, combined a fabricated architectural set, life-size figures, paintings, and video in a disturbing reinterpretation of Johanna Spyri’s novel. The project investigates the "materiality of the trauma" by transforming an idealised story of childhood into a dysfunctional domestic environment. Later installations such as WS (2013) similarly reworked the imagery of Snow White, while the public sculpture Santa Claus (2001) in Rotterdam—popularly nicknamed the "Butt Plug Gnome"—turns a familiar festive figure into an ambiguous symbol of commerce, sexuality, and public controversy. Together, these works form a sensory archive of the "low life," exposing the friction between Hollywood spectacle and the "unruly" realities of the body and desire. McCarthy has presented major solo exhibitions at institutions including Tate Modern and Tate Liverpool, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the New Museum in New York, Whitechapel Gallery in London, and Haus der Kunst in Munich. His work has also appeared in several editions of the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial. It is held in major public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Tate, and the Centre Pompidou. McCarthy’s practice continues to examine how spectacle, repression, sexuality, and the body intersect within contemporary culture. Through dark humour, excess, and deliberate discomfort, his work confronts the "complex shit" of modern society and the unstable boundary between entertainment and violence, innocence and corruption, attraction and disgust.