ARAM MOSHAYEDI AND CONNIE BUTLER, WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY CATHERINE DAMMAN, BRUCE HAINLEY, AND PAUL McCARTHY

This book looks at Paul McCarthy’s drawings, a rarely examined aspect of his oeuvre, and offers a greater understanding of this provocative artist.

One of the world’s most prolific social critics, Paul McCarthy is best known for his work in performance, installation, film, and sculpture. He is internationally known as one of the key figures of performance history in Los Angeles. His works reference American cultural archetypes such as Disneyland, B movies, soap operas, comic books and contemporary politics. His magnificent drawings and epic films skewer, often profanely, mass media and consumer-driven American society by pointing to its hypocrisy, double standards, and repression. McCarthy is also deeply influenced by European avant-garde art, especially by figures such as Joseph Beuys and Samuel Beckett, and Viennese Actionism. McCarthy’s drawings share the same visual language as his three-dimensional works: violence, humor, sex, politics, art history and popular culture. Featuring works on paper in charcoal, pencil, pen and ink and collage, this selection includes pieces from McCarthy’s renowned “White Snow” series, his contributions to the “Plato in L.A.” project at the Getty Museum, and recent sketches in which, unsurprisingly given the current political climate, McCarthy’s gloves-off approach feels both necessary and inevitable. This survey of McCarthy’s drawings spans fifty years and reveals an important aspect of his varied drawings techniques, and situates his body of works on paper as one of the most significant archives in contemporary art.

ARAM MOSHAYEDI is a writer and Curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles where he has organized exhibitions including Made in L.A. 2016 and Stories for Almost Everyone (2017). He has contributed to numerous publications, including exhibition catalogues and Artforum, BOMB Magazine, Art in America, and Frieze.

CONNIE BUTLER is Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She is the author of Marisa Merz and coauthor of Scorched Earth and Made in L.A. 2014.

264 pages with over 400 color illustrations
Hardcover
9¾ x 12 in. / 25 x 30.5 cm
ISBN 978-3-7913-5946-5