Zachęta National Gallery of Art

curator: Julia Leopold
exhibition design: Karin Seinsoth, Paul McCarthy

Paul McCarthy is one of the most well-known performance, video and film artists. His art is closely connected with the American way life. He grapples in an extremely radical manner with the traumas of the consumerist society, breaking taboos, provoking and deriding the icons of pop-culture: Hollywood, Disney, sitcoms, the Wild West ethos, movie stars. His practice is characterised by a tendency towards an exaggerated, chaotic and grotesque aesthetics. The viewer of his films is horrified by the characters’ uncontrolled actions and unjustified cruelty, disgusted by scatological and sexual allusions. Compared to a social anatomist or surgeon, McCarthy ruthlessly analyses its most secret traumas. However, as he stresses himself, the affinity between his practice and those of famous controversial performance artists such as the Vienna Actionists or Chris Burden is only superficial. Unlike them, McCarthy simply plays out roles and situations, creating his own theatre with its macabre characters, trap-like scenography and notoriously recurring props (e.g. ketchup as blood). Paradoxically, this does not make the world he creates any less shocking.

The drawings presented in the exhibition are a result of McCarthy’s collaboration with his friend Benjamin Weissman. The Quilting Sessions, initiated in 1997 with the work 1/2 Boy, have continued to this day. The mixed-media drawings were made during joint evening sessions by the table. They have been divided into groups and chapters according to the sessions during which they were produced. The exhibition’s title is a reference to the informal dimension of the two artists’ collaboration in which, thanks to improvisation and repetitions, they manage to gain access to the unconscious and release free expression. The drawings, published in catalogue form for the first time, are accompanied by a previously unpublished text by the two artists.

Paul McCarthy – he was born in 1945 in Salt Lake City, Utah, lives in Altadena, California. He studied at University of Utah (1966–1968), San Francisco Art Institute (1969), University of Southern California, Los Angeles (1973). In 1983, he abandoned performance and devoted himself to creating installations, objects, videos and films. Since the turn of the 1980s and 1990s he has pursued major film projects. The breakthrough in his career occurred with an exhibition at MOCA, Los Angeles, in 1992. Since then he has had solo shows at Tate Modern, London (2003); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2005); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2006); S.M.A.K., Gent (2007); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008). The Zachęta exhibition is the first presentation of his work in Poland. The artist is represented by Hauser & Wirth Zürich London.

Benjamin Weissman – writer, artist, critic. He is the author of two fantasy books (most recently, Headless). He has had solo exhibitions of his drawings, paintings and sculptures at Christopher Grimes Gallery in Santa Monica and Ursula Krinzinger Gallery in Vienna. His works are in the MOCA and Falkenberg collections. He has published texts on art and artists, skiing, books, theatre and film in exhibition catalogues and magazines such as Artforum, Frieze, Parkett, The Believer, The Los Angeles Time and SmokeLong Quarterly. He teaches at Otis College of Art and Design and is the curator of New American Writing at UCLA Hammer Museum.