Paul McCarthy (Salt Lake City, USA, 1945) is one of the most influential artists of recent years whose work covers diverse disciplines such as sculpture, performance or video. The show WS/SCCS Paintings and Drawings presents McCarthy’s paintings and drawings encompassing to his two major projects currently underway in his multidisciplinary practice: White Snow and Stagecoach. In both series, American archetypal narratives are thrown against human urges and desires, examined with McCarthy’s characteristic ingenuity and subversion. 

Drawing from its own tradition of improvised performance, scatological performative practices are represented on the canvas with a style laden with gestural painting and motivated by material experimentation and psychological processes. The use of collage entwines seemingly unconnected references, such as pages ripped from fashion magazines, images found on the Internet, or three-dimensional objects such as a coffee table, thus weaving expertly the history of painting with contemporary motifs.

Anthony McCall has a cross-disciplinary practice in which film, sculpture, installation, drawing and performance overlap. He is best known for his ground-breaking Solid Light installations, which explore the sculptural qualities of the light emitted by film projectors, bridging the boundaries between the material and immaterial, and returning to the essential qualities of film: light and time. These installations invite the viewer to participate in a truly immersive spectacle and create both a direct sensory experience and an investigation into spectatorship, space and beauty.

Works on display include the seven-minute film Landscape for Fire (1972), the room-sized installation Circulation Figures (1972), and the vertical work Between You and I (2006), which uses a traditional narrative cinema device for scene transitions called ‘the wipe’ in conjunction with conical, three-dimensional projected light forms.

Encompassing the full range of expressive media used by McCall, the exhibition highlights the interactivity of the works as well as the artist’s use of space as a visual and plastic element rather than a neutral container. The exhibition will be accompanied by a consultation room devoted to McCall’s works on paper, drawings, schematic diagrams, photographs and projects for open-air spaces.

‘Solid Light, Performance and Public Works’ by Anthony McCall ©Carlos Collado

‘Solid Light, Performance and Public Works’ by Anthony McCall ©Carlos Collado