Paul McCarthy

One of the most sacrilegious, irreverent, graphic and amusing artists of our time. Paul McCarthy has pushed the boundaries of aesthetics and sense of contemporary art towards landscapes where primordial chaos becomes an organized cosmos of garbage, chocolate, ketchup, naked puppets, bodily fluids and plastic inflatables. Openly anti-system, yet supported and loved by the system, Paul McCarthy is the master of paradox and provocation, albeit built on solid theoretical, conceptual and formal foundations. Just as you can’t judge a book by its cover, you can’t judge a work of art by its material–a ketchup bottle dripping behind lowered pants can have the same evocative and formal power as the Laocoön. Subverter of rigid Pop iconology, McCarthy opens and spills cans of soup to tell the story, like a memento mori, of the inevitable fate of the capitalist icon, destined like any image, culture or biological body, for decay and oblivion. Maybe, meanwhile, having a laugh about it.