Paul Mccarthy: 'The World Is Now An Extreme Absurdity. The Work Is A Reaction To That' The Art Newspaper International Art News And Events

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Paul McCarthy Returns to Santa Claus in Paris, With Loss and Improvisation in the Frame

At Hauser & Wirth in Paris, Paul McCarthy is revisiting one of the most durable figures in his practice: Santa Claus. The exhibition, SS EE Saint Santa Eva Elf, brings together new large drawings and a six-channel video installation made with the German actress Lilith Stangenberg, McCarthy's long-term collaborator, who appears here as Eva Elf.

The project extends a motif McCarthy has pursued for more than three decades, using Santa not as a sentimental emblem but as a vehicle for disquiet. In the interview, the American artist describes Santa Claus as“the god of capitalism and consumption,” a phrase that captures the way his work repeatedly turns festive iconography into a critique of commercial culture and social hierarchy.

The new drawings were made through improvised filming and drawing sessions inside part of the set for WS White Snow, the series that reconstructs McCarthy's childhood home in Salt Lake City. That setting matters. It links the new work to a personal geography already central to his practice, while also folding memory into performance. McCarthy says the drawings were made on the floor and on the wall rather than on a platform, and estimates that at least 15 to 20 large drawings were produced.

The exhibition also arrives in the shadow of profound loss. McCarthy says the Los Angeles fires destroyed his home, a drawing studio, one video editing studio, and many artworks, notebooks, and books. He notes that he and his family have since found a new house and are doing well, but the scale of what disappeared remains stark.

That tension - between theatrical excess and private devastation, between improvisation and reconstruction - gives SS EE Saint Santa Eva Elf its charge. McCarthy's work has long thrived on collision: between the sacred and the profane, the comic and the brutal, the remembered and the staged. In Paris, those oppositions feel especially close to the surface.

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