‘A&E, Adolf and Eva is about the relationship of male and female desire and violence. All these drawings are connected to the actions – the performance and the actions. […] The A&E video performance project is the work, it may not be about the ending. It’s about being in it, muddling in the shit. The drawings are spin-offs, taken out their house, and are deeply related.’
P. McCarthy, ‘Paul McCarthy with Dan Cameron’, in The Brooklyn Rail, April 2021
‘It is a physical process, making an object while in character, in persona. It is related to everyday life, the passing of time. The mediums of action/performance and object/sculpture get confused. I am interested in images produced during the performance; they are images in rectangles to be placed on the wall or in a book.’
P. McCarthy in conversation with K. Stiles, ‘Interview’, in Paul McCarthy, New York: Phaidon, 2016, p. 23
‘The paper goes on the table and then it starts. Each one of the drawings seems to come out of the actions and out of the air. They are sometimes related to each other, but they’re also unique – each one has its own structure, its own composition. While doing the drawing, I seem to go in and out of what's happening.’
P. McCarthy in conversation with C. Tittel, 'Just the Two of Us’, in Blau International, Spring/Summer 2022
‘I think that in part my work does refer to my own private, forgotten or repressed memories and that I seem to play them out unconsciously in my actions. It is from those repetitions that I recognize them as existing, but I am not sure how they relate to me. [… The] definition of performance as only being real or performance as reality is limiting; psychologically or perceptually I found myself giving it a new reality.’
P. McCarthy in conversation with K. Stiles, ‘Interview’, in Paul McCarthy, New York: Phaidon, 2016, p. 17
‘Describing Paul McCarthy’s work as a “spiral” emphasizes the dynamic, and the speed of it. It also highlights the work’s automatic drive – it moves form itself, and carries everything on the way. Such a reading needs to be balanced by its counterpart: reading the work as a transmutation. […]
Paul McCarthy’s work operates form constant transmutations within the stories: these stories come from the outside of his work, and from its inside – since the work has formed enough to become a world of its own, where interior and exterior no longer are significant categories.’
D. Grau, ‘Transmuting’, in Paul McCarthy: WS–CSSC. Drawing, Painting, Performance, exh. cat., Fundación Gaspar, Barcelona; Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2017, pp. 11–12
‘I get closer to Disney when Snow White becomes White Snow. I started working on WS in 2010 but had interruptions. I don’t get to it until 2012–13. I decided to make an artificial forest as a set, up on a platform, a pedestal. At some point the dwarf house became the house I grew up in and I would be Walt Disney or Walt Paul.’
P. McCarthy, ‘Paul McCarthy with Dan Cameron’, in The Brooklyn Rail, April 2021
‘Paul McCarthy uses brushes, pencil, crayons, charcoals or thick marker pens as instruments to penetrate matter – perhaps to advance to an imaginary deeper point after the umpteenth layer.’
E. Meyer-Hermann, ‘The Intangible Contained’, in Paul McCarthy: Brain Box Dream Box, exh. cat., Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Dusseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2004, p. 12
‘Paul McCarthy moves in and out of his own oeuvre in a way that makes it hard to discern the chronology. Many themes return throughout his production, from the early years at art school to the present day. He repeats and recreates many works, and the repetition and translation, the transferral of certain works into other media, has emerged as a theme in itself.’
M. af Petersens, ‘Paul McCarthy’s 40 years of hard work – an attempt at a summary’, in Paul McCarthy: Head Shop/Shop Head. Works 1966–2006, exh. cat., Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and travelling; Göttingen: Steidl, 2006, p. 10
‘The large-scale, powerfully drawn – partly collaged – Pirate Drawings were produced in the seclusion and concentration of the studio. They are an intuitive playground for creating characters and sequences of events. In spontaneous acts by the artist, canons become shooting penises, the noble ship of the bold captain conceals in its bowels a morass of dubious heroes from the world of advertising and glamorous living. The bloodbath in the drawing, the constant battle of thick crayons against the obstinate paper, stuck-down seams and floods of unwieldy, pornographic images are translated in the film into brutal scenes of mutilation and castration.’
E. Meyer-Hermann, ‘VI: Pirate Project’, in Paul McCarthy: Brain Box Dream Box, exh. cat., Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2004, p. 86
‘McCarthy’s work is that of a painter turning a work inside out so completely that it becomes sculptural, architectural, performative, photographic, filmic, and conceptual. The cumulative nature of his process refuses singular containment, whether it is of material, medium, space, or art-historical context.’
C. Iles, ‘Preface’, in Paul McCarthy: Central Symmetrical rotation movement: Three Installations, Two Films, exh. cat., New York: Whitney Museum of Modern Art, 2008, pp. 6–7
‘Twenty years into his life as an artist, McCarthy sought to further refine the relationship between the physicality of performance and the environment in which a given performance takes place. Through the medium of video, he strove to question the ways in which art-making is inextricably linked to a persona, to an artist’s performance of the self, and to an artist’s ability – or inability – to inhabit a role within an art historical lineage that remains dominated by men and the masculine narrative of creative genius.’
A. Moshayedi, ‘How to Kill a Nightmare’, in Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019, exh. cat., Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Munich/ London/ New York: DelMonico Books, 2020, p. 15
‘McCarthy’s destruction and dismantling is spread across multiple disciplines from painting, sculpture, and drawing, to performance, video, film, installation, and architecture, through which the body expresses the condition of the alienated self.
In McCarthy’s work, the body is manifested both corporeally and as architecture, housing, but also trapping, the unconscious. As both the container and producer of internal anxiety, architecture becomes an oedipal figure that McCarthy dismantles, acts out within, and rebuilds, creating structures that not only occupy the same space as the body – they become the body.’
C. Iles, ‘Baroque, Modern, Vertiginous, existencial: Paul McCarthy and the politics of space’, in Paul McCarthy: Central Symmetrical rotation movement: Three Installations, Two Films, exh. cat., New York: Whitney Museum of Modern Art, 2008, p. 12
‘With the gradual introduction of new possibilities for linking spatial and behavioral concerns, McCarthy’s work over the past few years has achieved a conviction and acute grasp of psychic trauma which few if any of his contemporaries can match. […] The images and texts that suffuse his art are drawn directly from both media-generated ideals of behaviour and the depths of his own psyche; his characters and settings are a universal repository of the fears, obsessions and conflicts that face the human species at an evolutionary crossroads.’
D. Cameron, ‘The Mirror Stage’, in Paul McCarthy, exh. cat., New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2000, p. 63
‘McCarthy’s fluid portrayal of others undermines the notion of authorial presence. Since 1963, his artistic identity has been subsumed by characters. In the early drawing Self-Portrait (1963), rendered in pen on paper, the artist portrays himself as a sweet and gentle ape with a bemused smile and inviting stare. This self-image contrasts sharply with the archetype of desire and untethered male aggression anthropomorphized by Hollywood in the 1933 film King Kong. McCarthy’s sketch offers an intimate portrait of the artist at a moment of questioning. […]
Although it is a sentimental portrait, McCarthy’s early fantastical projection of himself as a primate presages the tone and tenor of the abject performances that followed in the subsequent decade.’
A. Moshayedi, ‘How to Kill a Nightmare’, in Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019, exh. cat., Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Munich/London/New York: DelMonico Books, 2020, p. 13
Bound to Fail – PM HM Sculpture on a Pedestal, 2003–2004: photo credit unknown
Unless otherwise stated:
© Paul McCarthy, courtesy of the artist, and Hauser & Wirth
here