The US artist Paul McCarthy has been probing the darkish underbelly of our modern commercialised tradition for greater than 5 a long time. Throughout multifarious media together with efficiency, movie and video, sculpture, drawing, pictures and animatronics, the ebullient and transgressive dangerous boy of up to date artwork takes no prisoners as he lampoons social hierarchies and challenges standard energy relations. Nothing is simply too sacred or profane: Walt Disney, Snow White, Queen Elizabeth II, George W. Bush, Willem de Kooning and Adolf Hitler have all featured as caricatured protagonists in McCarthy’s taboo-busting eventualities the place abused and abusers meet, soften and merge, and each sacred cow is up for slaughter.
Now, in his exhibition SS EE Saint Santa Eva Elf at Hauser & Wirth in Paris, McCarthy has returned to one in all his most enduring motifs: Santa Claus. The present finds the octogenarian artist reprising the function of (a really dangerous) Santa, becoming a member of forces along with his long run collaborator, the German actress Lilith Stangenberg, because the Elf, to participate in a gruelling and disconcerting collection of filmed performances which have resulted in a brand new physique of enormous drawings and a six-channel video set up. McCarthy can be exhibiting earlier drawings made with Stangenberg at Bowman Hal gallery in Madrid.
McCarthy has made a brand new collection of drawings, created throughout filmed performances with Lilith Stangenberg, which might be on present at Hauser & Wirth, Paris Photograph: Nicolas Brasseur; © Paul McCarthy; courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
The Artwork Newspaper: This interview was initially imagined to coincide along with your Hauser & Wirth present in London firstly of 2025, which needed to be cancelled mid-install when the Los Angeles fires destroyed your own home, in addition to the houses of your youngsters, Damon and Mara. How are you doing after such a disaster?
Paul McCarthy: The factor in regards to the hearth is that it’s simply all gone. You realise it fairly fast. I had some garments in a suitcase, [McCarthy’s wife] Karen had nothing and acquired out with the canine. Mara about the identical, and Damon too. I misplaced a drawing studio, and we misplaced one of many video modifying studios. However now now we have a home and we’re fairly joyful the place we’re dwelling. So, we’re all proper, however we misplaced plenty of artwork, drawings, notebooks and plenty of books. Loopy.
Your new work in Paris, SS EE Saint Santa Eva Elf, finds you reprising the function of Santa whereas making giant scale drawings throughout performative periods along with your long-term collaborator Lilith Stangenberg because the character of Eva Elf. Santa Claus has been one in all your key characters for greater than three a long time—why revisit him at this level?
Round 2015-16 I used to be requested by a manufacturing firm to make a horror film known as Devil Santa. It’s a complete style: I can’t let you know what number of horror movies have been made about Santa Claus. And I got here again with one known as Saint Santa, which they simply couldn’t perceive. Within the script I wrote that Santa Claus is a illness that causes psychosis and anyone that will get close to him turns into psychotic—it’s a house invasion function. Santa Claus is the god of capitalism and consumption. The manufacturing firm wouldn’t do it. I’m nonetheless engaged on the script. I nonetheless need to do it. Then we did [the collaborative film projects] NV Night time Vater (2019) and A&E, Adolf/Adam & Eva/Eve (2020-22). In 2025 Lilith mentioned, “Why don’t we make extra drawings?” And in August final 12 months we each had time. We’d made plenty of A&E drawings in 2022. We determined to shift the characters to Saint Santa and Eva Elf. We knew this could have an effect on the drawings, they’d change.
The filmed drawing periods for SS EE had been made in a part of the unique set for the WS White Snow collection (2012-13), which reconstructs the inside of your childhood house in Salt Lake Metropolis. This had already housed some intense encounters between the characters of White Snow, Walt Paul and the dwarves. Why did you select it for Santa and Eva Elf?
I believed it was attention-grabbing to make the SS EE drawings within the set that was the Dwarf Home—the home of Walt Paul and White Snow in addition to a reconstruction of my dad or mum’s home. Then there’s my historical past of rising up in that home and my reminiscences of Santa and the Christmas tree in that lounge. The tree within the set is the tree from the White Snow piece. Turning my household home right into a studio appeared good. The drawings had been finished in the lounge, eating room, kitchen, my dad or mum’s bed room, and within the room that was known as the rumpus room, which was down within the basement. All the massive drawings I’ve made earlier than have been made on a platform, however these drawings of SS EE had been finished on the ground and on the wall.
Paul McCarthy and Lilith Stangenberg in one of many SS EE, Saint Santa Eva Elf drawing periods Photograph: Alex Stevens; © Paul McCarthy; Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
I appeared on the drawings in Paris—particularly the ground drawings—very in a different way after watching the 2 movies displaying how that they had emerged out of such intensely bodily and generally nearly excruciatingly visceral performances. How do you strategy these drawing periods? Are they deliberate in any respect prematurely?
The drawing periods are completely different from the feature-length chapters of Night time Vater and A&E. In these, there’s a script and the script offers a sort of skeleton to the improvisation; it could actually lead into issues. However with the drawing periods, we by no means speak about what we’re going to do, what’s going to occur. We by no means speak about what the opposite will put on. We merely start. It’s very quick, it’s an improvisation, and every one of many movies are fairly completely different.
For SS EE I believe we made at the least 15 to twenty giant drawings, and every time they appeared to vary. What occurs in them is difficult to explain. There’s plenty of components to those drawing periods. I don’t consider it as being in a trance. For me there are misplaced moments. It’s like getting into one other world. Lilith and I’ve finished 100 or extra actions collectively. We’re each within the sudden moments, when issues match collectively, while you really feel such as you’re inside a drawing, inside an motion.
Generally these actions might be excessive to the purpose of being nearly insufferable to look at, with the viewer not understanding the place or how far it’s going to go. Do you, within the throes of constructing the work, really feel the identical manner?
Lilith and I belief one another and we attempt to maintain one another. I believe we each consider within the photographs of the drawings and the performances. It’s in the end an try to make one thing that we consider in; we each see the world and artwork in an analogous manner. It will be significant, I believe, that it impacts us, that we really feel it, and that it’s crucial. That it’s of the existential. The world is now an excessive absurdity. I believe the work is a response to that. You discover one thing, and it takes you someplace. When Eva/Lilith attracts Mickey Mouse on her abdomen with lipstick and I rub it with my face and it goes to the bottom, that’s the way it begins.
Through the years you may have introduced an array of grotesque buffoon figures that parody and critique the methods and the abuses that they embody. However now, in actual life, we get a deadly apotheosis of all-consuming buffoonery within the type of Donald Trump. How do you reply when the present US president is extra horrific than nearly something you may have portrayed?
Trump is actually a caricature; he’s a cartoon. A violent damaging madness able of energy. How can I be extra exaggerated than Trump? That’s not the purpose. I believe it’s extra about “what’s it?”, him and us. For me it’s about making a picture in one other kind that reveals what’s on the backside of it. I’m making an attempt to capsulise what’s in entrance of me. It’s my manner of coping with it. It’s what comes out of me, like throw-up. It’s a regurgitation of life. It’s like respiratory out and in. As people that is what we’ve created. We’re these easy absurd cartoons.
What do you are feeling artwork can say or do, in response to those darkish instances?
It’s all the time the identical topics: existence, want, demise, bodily actuality, physique, violence, male/feminine. And now the demise dive, how shut can we get to it. For myself, I can’t care what different folks consider the work. That may be tough, there’s a lot strain to test your self. In my case it’s the character of my artwork. I’ve to simply begin, it’s an evolution, a growth. One piece results in the subsequent one. You start right here, and fairly quickly the components match collectively. I simply need to do what I’ve all the time finished. What’s crucial in all that isn’t to dam it. Society can cease it. The artwork world can cease it. The galleries can cease it. The individuals who purchase the artwork can cease it. You may’t hearken to it. It’s essential proper now.
McCarthy’s SS EE, Pose File, Diptych, D1 #2 and 1 (2025) is a part of the collection of drawings on present in Paris. “It’s like getting into one other world,” the artist says of the method of making them throughout filmed performances Photograph: Fredrik Nilsen; © Paul McCarthy; Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Biography
Born: 1945 Salt Lake Metropolis, Utah
Lives and works: Los Angeles
Training: 1966-68 College of Utah, Salt Lake Metropolis; 1968-69 San Francisco Artwork Institute; 1969-70 College of Utah, Salt Lake Metropolis; 1970-73 College of Southern California, Los Angeles
Key Exhibits: 1979 Los Angeles Institute of Modern Exhibitions; 1995 Museum of Trendy Artwork, New York; 1999 Venice Biennale (with Jason Rhoades); 2000 Museum of Modern Artwork, Los Angeles; 2001 New Museum, New York;Tate Liverpool; 2003 Tate Trendy, London; 2005 Whitechapel Gallery, London; Haus der Kunst, Munich; 2006 Moderna Museet, Stockholm; 2008 Whitney Museum of American Artwork, New York; 2011 Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; 2013 Park Avenue Armory, New York; 2018 M Woods Museum, Beijing; 2021 Kode, Bergen
Represented by: Hauser & Wirth, Xavier Hufkens and Max Hetzler
• Paul McCarthy: SS EE Saint Santa Eva Elf, Drawing Classes 2025 with Lilith Stangenberg, Hauser & Wirth, Paris, till 31 Might
• Paul McCarthy: A&E, Adolf/Adam & Eva/Eve, Drawing Classes 2020-22 with Lilith Stangenberg, Bowman Hal, Madrid, till 16 Might
