Paul McCarthy

Paul McCarthy (b. 1945, Salt Lake City) is widely considered one of the most influential and transgressive American artists of his generation, and a foundational figure of Los Angeles performance art. After earning a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute (1969) and an MFA from USC (1972), McCarthy staged visceral performances throughout the 1970s that used his own body as brush and canvas — smearing himself with ketchup, mayonnaise, and raw meat in works like Sauce (1974) and Sailor's Meat (1975) that attacked the pieties of painting, commercial entertainment, and polite society. Rooted, by his own account, not in European ritual but in LA kids' television — "more about being a clown than a shaman" — his work mined the dark underbelly of American family life, Disney mythology, and consumer culture. In the 1980s he shifted from live performance to video and installation, later collaborating with Mike Kelley on the notorious Heidi (1992) and producing landmark works like Bossy Burger (1991) and Painter (1995). For nearly two decades he taught performance and video in UCLA's New Genres department, shaping generations of West Coast artists. McCarthy has exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Whitney Museum, Tate Modern, and museums worldwide; he lives and works in Los Angeles.