Xavier Hufkens
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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.