SOLO CSV hosts an encounter with Paul McCarthy (Salt Lake City, 1945), a key figure in the history of contemporary art and one of the most radical and unsettling voices on the international scene. The conversation, moderated by Josechu Carreras, director of Batty Purple —the SOLO project connecting collectors with art and artists—, forms part of a series of events exploring the intersections between creation, thought, and contemporary artistic practice.
For more than five decades, McCarthy has made provocation and discomfort his natural language, dismantling the boundaries between art and spectacle, between high and low culture. In his work, the myths of Hollywood, the icons of mass culture, and the ghosts of the American Dream are distorted to expose their deepest contradictions. With dark humor and sharp insight, his practice turns the grotesque into a form of critical reflection.
Considered one of the most influential and visionary artists of our time, Paul McCarthy continues to expand the limits of contemporary art, inviting the viewer to confront their own distorted reflection in the mirrors of absurdity and symbolic violence.
From his early performances in the 1970s —in which he replaced oil paint with food and bodily fluids— to the monumental installations and animatronic sculptures of recent decades, McCarthy has continually questioned the notion of representation, transforming the body, his own or that of others, into a symbolic battlefield. His practice encompasses performance, video, photography, painting, drawing, and sculpture, all rooted in a strong conceptual foundation that cuts across media.
Since the 1990s, his research has expanded into large-scale installations and sculptures, created in fiberglass, silicone, or inflatable vinyl, which occupy an ambiguous space between farce and collective trauma. These caricatured figures and oversized objects satirize the worlds of entertainment, politics, philosophy, and science, exposing the latent violence beneath the surface of spectacle.
Educated at the San Francisco Art Institute (BFA, 1969) and the University of Southern California (MFA, 1973), McCarthy taught for nearly two decades in the New Genres department at UCLA, where he influenced generations of West Coast artists. His career includes collaborations with Mike Kelley, Jason Rhoades, and Damon McCarthy, his son, with whom he has developed several audiovisual projects.