Paul McCarthy

Paul McCarthy (b. 1945, Salt Lake City, Utah) is an American artist based in Los Angeles whose work — spanning performance, sculpture, installation, video, and drawing — submits American mythology, consumer culture, domesticity, and masculinity to a sustained and frequently brutal critical pressure. He studied at the University of Utah (BFA, 1969) and the University of Southern California (MFA, 1973), and subsequently taught at UCLA for many years. His practice is among the most uncompromising in postwar American art.

McCarthy emerged from a West Coast performance tradition in the 1970s — influenced by Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, and Allan Kaprow — making durational body-based actions that used condiments, bodily functions, and physical humiliation as materials. From the 1980s, this energy was channeled into sculptural installations of increasing scale and complexity, drawing on Hollywood, Disneyland, fairy tales, advertising, and the iconography of the nuclear family. Works such as Bossy Burger (1991), in which he performed as a deranged short-order cook in a television set, and Cultural Gothic (1992), a latex figure of a farmer and his son in a disturbing tableau, use popular culture as a vehicle for the articulation of violence, repression, and failure embedded in the American imaginary. Later large-scale projects — including Caribbean Pirates (Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2005) and WS (Park Avenue Armory, New York, 2013; subsequently Hauser & Wirth internationally) — expanded this territory into near-operatic installation.

McCarthy's work has been included in the Venice Biennale on multiple occasions and exhibited at institutions including Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, Haus der Kunst, and MoMA PS1. He is represented by Hauser & Wirth, and his work is held by major international collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, and the Centre Pompidou.