Sailor's Meat, Sailor's Delight, 1975 - 2002

Paul McCarthy’s art is a pitiless and satirical portrait of contemporary society. Through performance, sculpture, and video the artist has created a language that, on the one hand, winks ironically at the expressive means coined by industry and by television and, on the other, demonstrates a strong affinity for crucial moments in art history.

His videos and installations reveal the accumulation typical of consumerism stimulated by industrial production, in performances that recall the tone of television soap operas and Walt Disney’s animated cartoons. In a theatrical setting that is very close to Pop Art, McCarthy creates performances that are anything but reassuring; nightmares, perversions, and repressed violence are explicated in a theatricality that resembles Expressionist canvases and the gesturalism of body art. [...]