Venue: Kukje Gallery K2, K3

There’s something about being held within the form, like the actual person, the life cast, is held within the fantasy of the form. It’s a piece that draws you in. You go around the back, you come to the front... – Excerpt from artist interview

Kukje Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of Paul McCarthy open from September 14 to October 29, 2017. This is the artist’s second showing at Kukje Gallery following his acclaimed exhibition Paul McCarthy: nine dwarves in 2012.

Paul McCarthy occupies a critically important place in contemporary art. Over more than four decades his work has repeatedly challenged audiences to confront popular myths and wrestle with the psychological undercurrents of capitalism. His work is both generous and confrontational; meticulously conceived and crafted no matter what medium he uses, his complex, often overlapping projects have come to define the zeitgeist of postmodern visual art. Exploiting genres as diverse as sculpture, performance, film, and photography, McCarthy has invented an entirely new category of art making—a mash-up of mass media and cultural fantasia that is at once universal and shockingly personal.

This balance of culture and psychology is the underlying theme of this show that continues the artist’s exploration of myth, folklore and popular iconography including familiar stories such as Snow White. Made famous by Walt Disney’s beloved 1937 animated classic film ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,’ the role of the innocent princess has served as a cipher for McCarthy’s exploration of how media commercializes desire, best illustrated by the countless kitsch objects that have been created over the past century to market the fairy tale. McCarthy has appropriated these ubiquitous figurines, altering their scale and fragmenting them in both heroic and abject ways. In repeatedly co-opting familiar tropes of normative social values, McCarthy confronts the way our identity is constructed, often subconsciously.

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