PAUL MCCARTHY – RAW SPINOFFS CONTINUATIONS
2017-01-16These most recent works in the artist’s major ongoing project ‘White Snow’ vividly illustrate the roles that repetition and variation play in his oeuvre. McCarthy’s 2013 video installation at the Park Avenue Armory ‘White Snow’ is the modern interpretation of Walt Disney’s beloved 1937 animated classic film ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, in which the original stories’ archetypal narratives are pitched against real human drives and desires. McCarthy’s original sculpted clay dwarves were altered and distorted variations of Disney’s Seven Dwarfs. Even in their original iterations, McCarthy’s clay figures possessed additional layers of abstraction as a result of having been sculpted and re-sculpted via the artist’s frantic and impulsive performative process. They were subsequently cast in silicone (2010 – 2012), and although those richly colored versions are not included in ‘Raw Spinoffs Continuations’, they are integral manifestations of the journey that has produced this remarkable body of work to date. The process of silicone casting abstracted the original clay sculptures further, so that a second casting in bronze have acquired a new degree of rawness and pathos. Presented en masse, McCarthy’s bronze and clay dwarves reveal the artist‘s engagement with the life cycles of materials and together elicit meditations upon time, mortality, and the role of art in a realm of thought beyond the limits of flesh.
Opposite – White Snow Dwarf, Bashful (Affected Original), 2009—2016
Exhibition runs through to February 11th, 2017
Hauser & Wirth
32 East 69th Street
New York
NY 10021
