Review: Hammer Museum’s ‘Paul McCarthy: Head Space’ draws a revelatory picture of L.A. artist
This exhibition is the first comprehensive survey in the United States of drawings and works on paper by the Los Angeles-based Paul McCarthy (b. 1945, Salt Lake City), one of the most influential artists of his generation. Spanning more than five decades, the exhibition examines the significant role of drawing as it relates to McCarthy’s broader practice involving performance, video, photography, sculpture, and installation.
Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings, 1963–2019 is organized by Aram Moshayedi, curator, and Connie Butler, chief curator, with Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi, curatorial assistant, and Nicholas Barlow, curatorial assistant.
"In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Surrealism and Expressionism were dead in the water as viable strategies for making worthwhile new art.
The commercial language of Pop, the strict geometries of Minimalism and the idea-oriented trajectories of Conceptual art had rendered those earlier, messier approaches obsolete. Or so it seemed.
Enter Paul McCarthy. Talk about making a mess!
A huge retrospective drawing exhibition — more than 600 works from the last six decades and newly opened at the UCLA Hammer Museum — shows Surrealism and Expressionism roaring to life, beginning in 1963. The show opens with a “Self-Portrait” head — McCarthy, albeit transformed into a gorilla.
The great ape, drawn in sure if short, choppy strokes of black ink on an ordinary sheet of white paper, has one eye open and one eye closed, a benign grin swiped across his robust face. The gorilla’s hairy hands are held before him, as if being put on display.
In this surreal, surrogate self-portrait, the expressionist “hand of the artist” is powerful, confident and crude.
The artist was just 18 when he drew it. American kids, when first introduced to art, are often attracted to the fierceness of Surrealist irrationality and the churning anxieties of Expressionist emotion. Those idioms speak directly to roiling personal issues common to youth, and both are on view in this gruff if genial ape.
But, as the exhibition demonstrates in room after room, McCarthy never let up."— Christopher Knight, Feb. 18, 2020
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Los Angeles Times website.
Read more about Paul McCarthy.
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