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 unhealthy 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 every of his most enduring motifs: Santa Claus. The present finds the octogenarian artist reprising the function of (a really unhealthy) Santa, becoming a member of forces together 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 also 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 can 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 alleged to coincide together with your Hauser & Wirth present in London firstly of 2025, which needed to be cancelled mid-install when the Los Angeles fires destroyed your property, in addition to the houses of your kids, 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 obtained 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 we now have a home and we’re fairly comfortable the place we’re dwelling. So, we’re all proper, however we misplaced quite a lot of artwork, drawings, notebooks and quite a lot 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 classes together with your long-term collaborator Lilith Stangenberg because the character of Eva Elf. Santa Claus has been one in every of 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 referred to as Devil Santa. It’s a complete style: I can’t inform you what number of horror movies have been made about Santa Claus. And I got here again with one referred to as Saint Santa, which they only 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 yr we each had time. We’d made quite a lot of A&E drawings in 2022. We determined to shift the characters to Saint Santa and Eva Elf. We knew this may have an effect on the drawings, they might change.
The filmed drawing classes 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 residence 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 assumed 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 front room. The tree within the set is the tree from the White Snow piece. Turning my household home right into a studio appeared excellent. The drawings had been accomplished in the lounge, eating room, kitchen, my dad or mum’s bed room, and within the room that was referred to as the rumpus room, which was down within the basement. All the big drawings I’ve made earlier than have been made on a platform, however these drawings of SS EE had been accomplished on the ground and on the wall.
Paul McCarthy and Lilith Stangenberg in one of many SS EE, Saint Santa Eva Elf drawing classes Photograph: Alex Stevens; © Paul McCarthy; Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
I regarded on the drawings in Paris—particularly the ground drawings—very otherwise after watching the 2 movies displaying how they’d emerged out of such intensely bodily and typically nearly excruciatingly visceral performances. How do you method these drawing classes? Are they deliberate in any respect upfront?
The drawing classes are totally different from the feature-length chapters of Night time Vater and A&E. In these, there’s a script and the script provides a kind of skeleton to the improvisation; it might probably lead into issues. However with the drawing classes, we by no means discuss what we’re going to do, what’s going to occur. We by no means discuss what the opposite will put on. We merely start. It’s very rapid, it’s an improvisation, and every one of many movies are fairly totally different.
For SS EE I feel we made a minimum of 15 to twenty giant drawings, and every time they appeared to alter. What occurs in them is tough to explain. There’s quite a lot of elements to those drawing classes. 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 accomplished 100 or extra actions collectively. We’re each within the sudden moments, when issues match collectively, whenever you really feel such as you’re inside a drawing, inside an motion.
Typically these actions will be excessive to the purpose of being nearly insufferable to observe, with the viewer not realizing the place or how far it’ll go. Do you, within the throes of constructing the work, really feel the identical method?
Lilith and I belief one another and we attempt to care for one another. I feel we each consider within the photos of the drawings and the performances. It’s in the end an try and make one thing that we consider in; we each see the world and artwork in an identical method. It can be crucial, I feel, that it impacts us, that we really feel it, and that it’s essential. That it’s of the existential. The world is now an excessive absurdity. I feel 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.
Over time you could have introduced an array of grotesque buffoon figures that parody and critique the programs 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 could have portrayed?
Trump is actually a caricature; he’s a cartoon. A violent harmful madness able of energy. How can I be extra exaggerated than Trump? That’s not the purpose. I feel 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 attempting to capsulise what’s in entrance of me. It’s my method 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, loss of life, bodily actuality, physique, violence, male/feminine. And now the loss of life dive, how shut can we get to it. For myself, I can’t care what different individuals consider the work. That may be tough, there’s a lot strain to verify your self. In my case it’s the character of my artwork. I’ve to simply begin, it’s an evolution, a improvement. One piece results in the following one. You start right here, and fairly quickly the elements match collectively. I simply must do what I’ve all the time accomplished. What’s essential 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 possibly can’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 Up to date Exhibitions; 1995 Museum of Trendy Artwork, New York; 1999 Venice Biennale (with Jason Rhoades); 2000 Museum of Up to date 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 Periods 2025 with Lilith Stangenberg, Hauser & Wirth, Paris, till 31 Could
• Paul McCarthy: A&E, Adolf/Adam & Eva/Eve, Drawing Periods 2020-22 with Lilith Stangenberg, Bowman Hal, Madrid, till 16 Could
