WS & CSSC, Drawings and Paintings

Paul McCarthy (Salt Lake City, USA, 1945) is one of the most influential artists of recent years whose work covers diverse disciplines such as sculpture, performance or video. The show WS/SCCS Paintings and Drawings presents McCarthy’s paintings and drawings encompassing to his two major projects currently underway in his multidisciplinary practice: White Snow and Stagecoach. In both series, American archetypal narratives are thrown against human urges and desires, examined with McCarthy’s characteristic ingenuity and subversion. 

Drawing from its own tradition of improvised performance, scatological performative practices are represented on the canvas with a style laden with gestural painting and motivated by material experimentation and psychological processes. The use of collage entwines seemingly unconnected references, such as pages ripped from fashion magazines, images found on the Internet, or three-dimensional objects such as a coffee table, thus weaving expertly the history of painting with contemporary motifs.