Paul McCarthy “Raw Spinoffs Continuations”
Hauser & Wirth (511 W 18th St)
This event has ended.
Hauser & Wirth presents ‘Raw Spinoffs Continuations’, an exhibition of sculptures by Paul McCarthy. Featuring works from the artist’s most important projects of the last 15 years, including ‘WS’, ‘Caribbean Pirates’, and ‘Pig Island’, ‘Raw Spinoffs Continuations’ celebrates McCarthy’s distinctive process in the making and un-making of an artwork.
On view through 14 January 2017, ‘Raw Spinoffs Continuations’ will be the final exhibition at Hauser & Wirth’s West 18th Street space. The gallery’s new temporary home is 548 West 22nd Street, adjacent to the site of its future freestanding building at 542 West 22nd Street.
Hauser & Wirth will present a new series by McCarthy of bronze ‘White Snow Dwarfs’ alongside the original clay sculptures from which they were cast. These most recent works in the artist’s major ongoing project ‘White Snow’ vividly illustrate the roles that repetition and variation play in his oeuvre. McCarthy’s 2013 video installation at the Park Avenue Armory ‘White Snow’ is the modern interpretation of Walt Disney’s beloved 1937 animated classic film ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, in which the original stories’ archetypal narratives are pitched against real human drives and desires.
McCarthy’s original sculpted clay dwarves were altered and distorted variations of Disney’s Seven Dwarfs. Even in their original iterations, McCarthy’s clay figures possessed additional layers of abstraction as a result of having been sculpted and re-sculpted via the artist’s frantic and impulsive performative process. They were subsequently cast in silicone (2010 – 2012), and although those richly colored versions are not included in ‘Raw Spinoffs Continuations’, they are integral manifestations of the journey that has produced this remarkable body of
work to date. The process of silicone casting abstracted the original clay sculptures further, so that a second casting in bronze have acquired a new degree of rawness and pathos. Presented en masse, McCarthy’s bronze and clay dwarves reveal the artist‘s engagement with the life cycles of materials and together elicit meditations upon time, mortality, and the role of art in a realm of thought beyond the limits of flesh.
Also on view in the exhibition will be the large-scale installation ‘Chop Chop, Chopper, Amputation’ (2013 – 2016) from McCarthy’s Caribbean Pirates series. In this darkly carnivalesque work, a pair of disjoined clay figures wearing huge pirate hats, loom over a landscape littered with broken body casts, chairs, wooden platforms, sex toys, buckets, mugs, among other detritus, all punctuated by dollops of viscous, deep yellow polyurethane foam. Inspired by the Disneyland attraction ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’, the Caribbean Pirates project began in 2001 as a collaboration between Paul McCarthy and his son Damon McCarthy; it has produced a prodigious body of work, including sculptures, performance, and film. ‘Chop Chop, Chopper, Amputation’ is the merging of a pair of individual large- scale works in the series, based on two drawings by McCarthy – ‘Chopper’ and ‘Amputation’ – that were originally intended to stand independently from one another. Envisioned as a pirate boat, the installation rests on carpets that stand in for water filled with debris: the trash that has been thrown overboard by the vessel’s unruly occupants.
Along with ‘Chop Chop, Chopper, Amputation’, the exhibition includes ‘Amputation (AMP), Blue Fiberglass’ (2013 – 2016), a blue fiberglass cast of ‘Amputation’ never before exhibited. ‘Chop Chop, Chopper, Amputation’ will have changed from previous showings due to the process of removing ‘Amputation’ from the larger work in order to mold and cast the blue fiberglass iteration. As with the clay dwarf sculptures, ‘Amputation’ has undergone a separate journey and further abstraction in McCarthy’s endless loop of action.
The exhibition will be completed by ‘Paula Jones’ (2005 – 2008) and ‘Puppet’ (2005 – 2008), both born out of McCarthy’s mammoth, celebrated opus ‘Pig Island’ (2005 – 2010). Combining political figures and elements drawn from pop culture, ‘Pig Island’ evolved over seven years in the artist’s studio, ultimately becoming a surreal compilation of themes that have coursed through McCarthy’s work for decades. Originally conceptualized as an island of robotic pirates and pigs, drawing inspiration from the earlier ‘Piccadilly Circus’ (2003), ‘Pig Island’ is populated by pirates, pigs, likenesses of George W. Bush and Angelina Jolie, an assortment of Disney characters, and the artist himself, all carousing in a state of reckless abandon. Originally part of this dark bacchanal, the sculptures ‘Puppet’ and ‘Paula Jones’ feature caricatures of former President George W. Bush and pot-bellied pigs engaged in sexual acts.
Born in 1945 in Salt Lake City, Utah, Paul McCarthy is one of the most important and influential contemporary American artists. He is known for challenging, visceral work in a variety of mediums – from performance, photography, video, and installation, to sculpture, drawing and painting – and scales ranging from tiny to monumental. Playing on popular illusions, delusions, and cultural myths, his work has often incorporated obsessive activities and challenged expected physical orientation. Absent or present, the human figure has been a constant in his work, whether through the artist‘s own performances or the army of characters he has created to deliberately confuse codes, mix high and low culture, and provoke an analysis of our fundamental beliefs.
McCarthy studied art at the University of Utah and went on to receive a BFA in painting at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969. He studied film, video, and art at the University of Southern California, receiving an MFA in 1972. From 1982 to 2002, he taught performance, video, installation, and performance art history at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Paul McCarthy: White Snow, Wood Sculptures’, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle WA (2016 – 2017); ‘Paul McCarthy’, Lokremise, St. Gallen, Switzerland (2016); ‘Paul McCarthy. Drawings’, The Renaissance Society, Chicago IL (2015); Volksbühne, Berlin, Germany (2015); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, Germany (2015); ‘Inbetween. Baselitz – McCarthy’, Economou Collection, Athens, Greece (2015); ‘Paul McCarthy. Spin Offs: White Snow WS, Caribbean Pirates CP’, Hauser & Wirth Zürich, Switzerland (2015); ‘Chocolate Factory’, Monnaie de Paris, Paris, France (2014) and ‘Paul McCarthy – WS SC’, Hauser & Wirth London (2014). In February 2014 he realized a collaborative exhibition project with Mike Bouchet at Portikus in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. In summer 2013 McCarthy presented three solo exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth New York 18th and 69th street. In June, ‘WS’ went on display at Park Avenue Armory in New York, McCarthy‘s largest installation in the United States to date. Other solo exhibitions include ‘The Box’, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany (2012); the artist’s first transatlantic exhibitions, ‘The King, The Island, The Train, The House, The Ship’ and ‘The Dwarves, The Forests’, which opened respectively at Hauser & Wirth London and Hauser & Wirth New York in 2011; ‘Pig Island’, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan, Italy (2010); ‘White Snow’, Hauser & Wirth New York NY (2009); ‘Paul McCarthy – Air Pressure’, an exhibition of inflatable sculptures at De Uithof, City of Utrecht, Netherlands (2009); ‘Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement – Three Installations, Two Films’, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY (2008) and the travelling retrospective, ‘Paul McCarthy – Head Shop / Shop Head’ which first opened at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2006); and travelled to Aarhus Museum of Art, Aarhus, Denmark (2007) and Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (2007 – 2008).
Paul McCarthy currently lives and works in Los Angeles CA.
Media
Schedule
from November 10, 2016 to February 04, 2017
Opening Reception on 2016-11-10 from 18:00 to 20:00