ART-PRESENTATION:Paul McCarthy-A&E Drawing Session, Santa Anita

Paul McCarthy is widely considered to be one of the most influential and groundbreaking contemporary American artists. Born in 1945, and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, he first established a multi-faceted artistic practice, which sought to break the limitations of painting by using unorthodox materials such as bodily fluids and food. He has since become known for visceral, often hauntingly humorous work in a variety of mediums – from performance, photography, film and video, to sculpture, drawing and painting.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Hauser & Wirth Archive

Two simultaneous exhibitions with Paul McCarthy that are united by the artist’s focus upon intractable myths, fantasies, and delusions coursing through contemporary society and consumer culture. “Alpine Stories and other Dystopias” with a selection of the artist’s drawings, photographs, sculptures, and video work from his acclaimed series and the online exhibition “A&E Drawing Session, Santa Anita”, that unveils a new series of large scale drawings from McCarthy’s latest multidisciplinary project “A&E” (2019- ). Produced in thematic cycles, Paul 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. Created during a series of freely improvised drawing sessions, or “performances” between McCarthy and German actress Lilith Stangenberg, these new works on paper coalesce themes of violence and power characteristic in McCarthy’s work with his longstanding interest in drawing, performance, and film.  “A&E” is an acronym for Adolf & Eva, Adam & Eve and Arts & Entertainment. “A&E” finds McCarthy transformed into Adolf Hitler, Adam and Stangenberg as Eva Braun, Eve. The project at this point takes the form of one, a feature film series and two, multiple drawing sessions. Adolf is depicted as the epitome of predatory toxic masculinity and buffoonery, while Eva is at once the lover, mother, and daughter. In these works, crude, expressionistic marks from these unrehearsed performance drawing sessions are captured on paper In keeping with McCarthy’s multidisciplinary oeuvre, the drawings have evolved out of the artist’s current film project “NV Night Vader” (2019– ), based on Liliana Cavani’s sadomasochistic erotic drama “The Night Porter” (1974). In this unsettling drama, a concentration camp survivor (Charlotte Rampling) discovers her former torturer and lover (Dirk Bogarde) working as a porter at a hotel in postwar Vienna. When the couple attempt to re-create their sadomasochistic relationship, his former SS comrades begin to stalk them. Operatic and disturbing, the film deftly examines the lasting social and psychological effects of the Nazi regime. The “NV Night Vader” project features a deranged cast of characters, including McCarthy as “Max”, a mafioso-like Hollywood executive, and Stangenberg in the role of Lucia, the central character of the 1974 movie, who here plays a young German Actress.

Info: www.hauserwirth.com