Paul McCarthy

Paul McCarthy is interested in everyday chaos

Paul McCarthy was born in Salt Lake City on 4 August 1945. He studied art at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah and then at the University of Utah. He left Utah in 1969 and went to California to study for a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. He then went on to study film and art at the University of Southern California, graduating with a Master of Fine Arts. From 1982 to 2002, Paul McCarthy himself taught at the University of California in Los Angeles. Regardless of his training as a painter, the artist was interested in performance, installation and sculpture from an early age and was primarily concerned with the human activities of everyday life and the often-resulting chaos. His works from the late 1960s and early 1970s show a certain proximity to Allan Kaprow (1927-2006), the founder of the ‘Happenings’, with whom Paul McCarthy was professionally associated.

Brutal criticism of US American consumer greed

Paul McCarthy's art proves himself a critical analyst of US American society with its focus on consumerism and mass media. His works refer to B-movies, comics, soap operas and Disneyland, while formally, however, he draws primarily from the European artistic avant-garde, namely Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) and the representatives of Viennese Actionism. The writings of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) also provided Paul McCarthy with fruitful inspiration. In the early 1970s, he began making video films. Playing with perception and illusion, the artist used mirrors and twisted perspectives to irritate his audience with optical confusion. Paul McCarthy also did not shy away from self-harm and drastic actions, once throwing himself around in a classroom splashed with ketchup until he almost lost consciousness, then vomiting several times and inserting a Barbie doll into his rectum until the audience could no longer bear the sight and left the performance.

Deliberate irritations and provocations time and again

Paul McCarthy's questions and undermines the ideal of the heroic male artist with his art, and repeatedly causes provocation and uproar among the public. His Santa Claus could not be installed in its intended location because the public perceived the sculpture as having sexual connotations, and when his inflatable and flying Complex Shit was blown away by strong winds and caused a power line to collapse, it triggered an international press response. Children's book and film classics such as Johanna Spyri's novel Heidi and Disney's animated film Snow Whiteand the Seven Dwarfs were also addressed artistically by McCarthy, as was the successful film series Pirates of the Caribbean with Johnny Depp.

Paul McCarthy lives and works in Los Angeles.