Paul McCarthy

Hauser & Wirth, New York

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is deeper and richer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
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Throughout his astonishingly diverse career to date, Paul McCarthy has consistently transcended the boundaries of conventional artistic practice, forging a body of work that continues to challenge and fascinate. Utilising media as varied as video art, performance and sculpture, McCarthy re-interprets fairy tales, childhood stories and the seedier side of old-school Hollywood movies and television to create works that stand as gloriously macabre travesties of their source material. Violence and humour, sex and violation, all combine to form a piquant synthesis that is utterly unique in its manner of execution and in its power to both shock and tantalise the viewer in equal measure. Until the early 1990s, McCarthy was known primarily as a West Coast phenomenon: living and working in Los Angeles, his work was appreciated chiefly by discerning local collectors and institutions. In recent years however his work has become internationally renowned and highly sought after as McCarthy has continued to gain in recognition, and the artist has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía amongst other major institutions.

White Snow Dwarf (Sleepy) is a consummate example of McCarthy’s later practice: witty yet curiously poignant in its depiction of one of the eponymous dwarfs from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. McCarthy first began exploring the tale in a series of drawings in 2009, and would go on to produce three dimensional manifestations of the dwarves and other aspects of the story through various different media. The artist’s fascination with Disneyland has been a facet of his practice since the earliest days of his career, as he recalled in a recent interview: “My interest in Disneyland began in the early 70s, and it’s still going on… I was also interested in Disneyland and cleanliness – hygiene as the religion of fascism” (the artist cited in: an interview with Charlotte Burns in The Art Newspaper, Issue 228, October 2011, n.p.). Yet this is a version of Sleepy far removed from the anodyne Disney presentation and even from the fairy tale’s Nineteenth Century source material. McCarthy has created a nightmarishly twisted variation of the original: a grotesquely formed individual that stands as a mocking parody of its progenitor. With his gouged out eye and deformed limbs, White Snow Dwarf (Sleepy) should evoke a visceral sense of horror in the onlooker; yet there is an element of tragi-comic pathos inherent within McCarthy’s presentation of the maimed and emasculated dwarf.

McCarthy believes that the process of sculpting a figure should reveal the passage of time: the rubble gathered beneath the feet of the dwarf stands as evidence of this development.  McCarthy has declared that: “Casting… liberates the literal through a kind of unifying monotone, a different representation of the original thing that lets me explore where reality and abstraction intersect” (the artist cited in: Hauser & Wirth Press Release, ‘The Dwarves, The Forest’, 2011, n.p.). The warm brown colouration of White Snow Dwarf (Sleepy) evokes the sensation of rich chocolate, recalling McCarthy’s use of food stuffs to suggest bodily fluids within his earlier performance works. The apparent decay and degradation of White Snow Dwarf (Sleepy) is rendered shockingly tangible through the medium of sculpture, as though the marks of McCarthy’s ‘assault’ are clearly visible to the viewer: an effect that is remarkable in its very physicality.

McCarthy’s ‘desecration’ of a figure from the childhood world of magic and fairy tale acts as a subliminal attack on the sanctity of juvenile memories: a seemingly innocent tale adapted and re-imagined through a darkly adult lens. McCarthy has spoken of his belief that his work is influenced by his own childhood experiences and recollections: “I think that in part my work does refer to my own private, forgotten or repressed memories and that I seem to play them out unconsciously in my actions. It is from those repetitions that I recognise them as existing, but I am not sure how they relate to me. Are they specifically my traumas, or someone else’s that I have witnessed either directly or through the media?” (the artist in conversation with Kristine Stiles in: Ralph Rugoff, Kristine Stiles, Giacinto di Pietrantonio, Eds., Paul McCarthy, London 1996, p. 14). This concept of ‘repression’ and the release of earlier trauma invoke Freudian theories of the unconscious and infantile sexuality. McCarthy’s White Snow Dwarf (Sleepy) is the product of childhood fears and urges that are let loose here in a fantastical yet ghoulish re-incarnation of a fairy-tale character: an interpretation ingeniously imbued with the artist’s trademark mordent humour and pithy satire.