ART CITIES:Los Angeles -Paul McCarthy
The work of Paul McCarthy is unapologetic and sometimes, considered borderline perverse. 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 Efi Michalarou
Photo: Hauser & Wirth Gallery Archive
The exhibition “Paul McCarthy. WS Spinoffs, Wood Statues, Brown Rothkos” is Hauser & Wirth Gallery’s first exhibition in Los Angeles devoted to the provocative and influential work of Paul McCarthy. The exhibition presents ‘spinoffs’ from “White Snow”, a major ongoing project within the artist’s multidisciplinary practice that subverts the 19th Century German folktale “Snow White” and the Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937). The works on view are 12 monumental carved black walnut sculptures of Snow White, the Prince, and Dopey, alongside arresting wall hangings thatseek to disrupt traditional notions of art and culture, while introducing viewers to McCarthy’s tireless exploration of mediums. The works are transmuted through a process that begins with commercially produced, collectible Disney figurines of unstintingly perfect proportions. Through McCarthy’s performative approach, those ‘tchotchkes’ are freed from their original predetermined ratios, as if released from societal repression and. infantilization. For these works, the artist turned to computer mapping to digitally scale, shape, and manipulate the final wood sculptures. The resulting pieces are recomposed, and sometimes grotesque, variations of familiar characters from the classic tale, such as the Prince, Dopey, and Snow White herself. The centerpiece of the exhibition, “White Snow, Bookends” (2013), is a two-part monumental sculpture weighing more than 16.300 Kg. The giant “tchotchkes” are entangled and dislocated representations of the Prince and White Snow on horseback that recall the elaborate compositions of Baroque sculpture, but that instead court truncated narratives and abstraction. “WS, White Snow and Prince on Horseback, Merger, Transformation, Mutation” (2015), amalgamates the subjects’ appendages into a hyperbolic composite: the three horses gallop on 12 legs, White Snow shrieks from two visible mouths, and the Prince’s head is larger than that of his surging stallion. With “WS, White Snow Dopey Dopey Head, Ten Feet” (2013-14), White Snow’s lips, grotesquely enlarged, swallow the head of a duplicated dwarf. The exhibition presents these works in juxtaposition with a group of McCarthy’s “Brown Rothkos”, sculptural, monochromatic wall hangings comprised of carpet covered in foam and sprayable polyurethane coating. Carpet, a regularly used ground material supporting the artist’s large-scale performative installations, has been ‘elevated’ here from the floor to the walls, and repurposed as a medium for expression.
Info: Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, 901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles, Duration: 1/7-17/9/17, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com
