Paul McCarthy

American artist Paul McCarthy is known for his wide-ranging and often provocative and disturbing œuvre, which encompasses performance, photography, film, multimedia installations, sculpture, drawing and painting. Messy, antagonistic, sexually explicit and politically charged, McCarthy’s output takes aim at consumerism, popular culture and our innermost fears and neuroses, such as sex, bodily fluids and human orifices. While he regularly appropriates icons of popular culture and childhood, including Santa Claus, Barbie, Snow White and Heidi in his work, McCarthy inevitably recasts his characters as violent, malicious and depraved. In a career spanning some five decades, McCarthy has come to be recognised as one of the greatest chroniclers, and transgressors, of contemporary social norms and taboos. Mercilessly ridiculing authority and the so-called rules of polite society, his anarchic œuvre mixes both high and low culture, and provokes an analysis of our most fundamental and sacrosanct beliefs.