ART-PRESENTATION:Paul McCarthy, Head Space / Drawings 1963-2019

Even for adults, Paul McCarthy is scary, his work throws at our face the dark side of the American Dream and Western consumer society. The artist focuses on the creation of confronting works, attempting to penetrate the conscience of the viewer. Despite this deeply dark element of his artistry, McCarthy is greatly influenced by the cartoons of Disney and by comic books, as well as the more high-brow Viennese Actionists. McCarthy is obsessed with altering the representation of the human form, creating figures obscured by nightmarish cartoon-like masks and unnatural looking wigs.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Hammer Museum Archive

The first comprehensive survey in the United States of drawings and works on paper by the Los Angeles–based Paul McCarthy, “Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019”, presents 600 worksselected from McCarthy’s archive and reveals a rarely examined aspect of the artist’s oeuvre. The exhibition delves into the significant role of drawing in McCarthy’s work. By presenting his expansive career of more than 50-years through the focused lens of drawing, the exhibition offers a greater understanding of this influential artist and social commentator. Produced in thematic cycles, McCarthy’s drawings share the same visual language as his sculptural and performance works, evoking and addressing themes of violence, humor, death, sex, politics, and featuring extensive art historical and popular cultural references. His drawings often feature a reoccurring assortment of figures and symbols, culled from Hollywood, fairytales, soap operas, comic books, Disney, and contemporary politics. Yet, in McCarthy’s work, these figures are perverse distortions of iconic and recognizable archetypes. The artist explores and subverts a culture of violence and toxic masculinity through hyperbole and grotesque magnification of its worst tendencies. His work skewers mass media and consumer-driven American society, often profanely, by underscoring aspects of cultural repression and forms of latent violence. The exhibition features works on paper that incorporate and utilize a variety of mediums, including charcoal, graphite, ink, marker, and collage, as well as more unorthodox materials such as ketchup and peanut butter. A consummate and accomplished draftsperson, McCarthy approaches his daily drawing practice as a way of thinking and a blueprint for projects and a tool to flesh out complex ideas. Since the 1970s, McCarthy has also incorporated drawing into his performances, implementing it as part of an action and often drawing in character. In recent years, this role of drawing in character has become central to his large scale video performance projects, such as “WS White Snow” (2012-13), “CSSC Coach Stage Stage Coach” (2017), and “NV Night Vater” (2019- ). The  drawings produced in character for these sessions stand outside of the video performances. In a process McCarthy terms “Life Drawing, Drawing Sessions” the artist and his actors produce drawings in costume among the props and simulacrum of his film sets. These works bring together the materials and crude gestures that have been present in the artist’s work for the greater part of his career.  A selection of McCarthy’s videos and films will be screened in the Billy Wilder Theater through-out the run of the exhibition.

Info: Curators: Aram Moshayedi and Connie Butler, Assistant Curators: Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi and Nicholas Barlow, Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, Duration: 2/2-10/5/20Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, https://hammer.ucla.edu