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A piece by Paul McCarthy

Paul McCarthy’s irreverent art on display at Fundació Gaspar

The gallery on Barcelona’s Carrer Montcada is to host the art of one of the US’s most provocative creators

It’s difficult to characterise the work of Paul McCarthy (Salt Lake City, United States 1945). His long and diverse career has seen incursions into the fields of video art and sculpture, he has also been attracted to ephemeral art of performance, and when he is faced by a blank canvas or any other surface his language is pitched somewhere between punk, abstraction and pop art. He uses techniques like collage and is even spoken of as being scatological since he has always been interested in refuse and in using recycled rubbish and even his own excrement in the pictorial process. All of this makes him something of an enfant terrible in the world of visual arts and a polemical creator with plenty of followers. You can see his work at Fundació Gaspar until 17 July.

The exhibition, which is titled ‘WS & CSSC, Paintings & Drawings’, is a selection of McCarthy’s recent pictorial work, featuring two projects named ‘White Snow’ and ‘Stagecoach’. These two projects exemplify many of his obsessions: sex, the body as an instrument of pleasure and filth, mutilation and pain. It’s an exhibition with a powerful element of provocation that will not go unnoticed.

Additional information is available from the foundation’s website, where you can also buy tickets.

Publication date: Wednesday, 14 June 2017
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