Cut Up and Silicone, Female Idol, WS
2017.09.14 ▶ 2017.10.29
2017.09.14 ▶ 2017.10.29
폴 맥카시
White Snow Head Silicone (flesh), fibreglass, steel, 140 x 160 x 185 cm, Photo by Genevieve Hanson, Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Kukje Gallery
폴 맥카시
Picabia Idol 2015-2017, Silicone, 162.6 x 76.2 x 58.4 cm, Photography © 2017 Fredrik Nilsen, All Rights Reserved, Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Kukje Gallery
폴 맥카시
Picabia Idol Core 2015-2017, Silicone 156.8 x 50.8 x 69.9 cm, Photography © 2017 Fredrik Nilsen, All Rights Reserved, Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Kukje Gallery
폴 맥카시
Cut Up A 2015-2017, Urethane resin, 182.9 x 76.2 x 61 cm, Photo by Walla Walla Foundry, Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Kukje Gallery
폴 맥카시
《Cut Up and Silicone, Female Idol, WS》 설치전경 이미지 제공: 국제갤러리
폴 맥카시
《Cut Up and Silicone, Female Idol, WS》 설치전경 이미지 제공: 국제갤러리
폴 맥카시
《Cut Up and Silicone, Female Idol, WS》 설치전경
국제갤러리는 현대미술의 지평을 넓힌 세계적인 작가 폴 맥카시의 개인전을 개최한다. 이번 전시는 작가의 국내 첫 개인전이자 K3 개관전이였던 《Paul McCarthy: nine dwarves》 이후 두 번째 마련된 자리로 K2와 K3 두 전시장에 걸쳐 일련의 조각과 회화 연작들을 선보인다.
폴 맥카시는 지난 40여 년간 활발한 예술적 실험과 도전을 거듭하며 현대미술사에서 독보적 입지를 공고히 해왔다. 퍼포먼스부터 비디오, 설치, 조각, 사진 드로잉까지 일정 매체에 국한되지 않은 그의 작업 세계는 다양한 소재와 장르를 넘나들며 정치적, 자본주의적 프로파간다에 무의식적으로 통제당한 미국 사회의 대중문화와 심리에 숨겨진 어두운 심연에 주목한다. 작가는 신화나 전승된 이야기, 보편적 도상들을 작품에 끌어들이는데 이는 정서적, 시각적으로 친숙한 소재와 이미지인 동시에 매스미디어와 사회 통념을 통해 정제된 것들이기도 하다. 뒤틀리고 짓이겨지는 것은 물론 복제, 파편화, 혹은 혼성적 결합의 과정을 거친 축적물은 소재와 매체가 지닌 기존의 성질과 정서를 뒤엎는, 결코 유쾌하지 않은 냉소적 기괴함으로 전환되어 풍요와 소비에 가려진 인간의 원초적 본성을 환기시킨다. 이번 전시에서 소개되는 작업들은 이러한 작가적 탐구의 독특하면서도 중요한 맥락들을 짚어낸다.
K2 전시장을 채우는 주요 작품군인
K3에 전시된
폴 맥카시는 1945년 미국 유타주 솔트레이크시티에서 태어났다. 유타 대학교, 샌프란시스코 아트 인스티튜트, 서던캘리포니아 대학교에서 수학했으며 1970년대 중반부터 퍼포먼스와 영상 작업으로 미술계의 주목을 받기 시작했다. 1990년대를 기점으로 고정되거나 움직이는 조각, 대형 공기 주입식 설치 작품으로 작업의 반경을 확장시켰으며 1990년대 중후반부터 마이크 켈리, 제이슨 로즈, 그리고 2000년대 중반부터는 데이먼 맥카시와 간헐적으로 협업한 바 있다. 전세계 유수의 미술관에서 개인전과 순회전을 가졌으며 주요 전시 기관으로는 해머미술관, 휘트니미술관, 스톡홀름 현대미술관, 테이트 리버풀, 테이트 모던, 뉴욕 뉴뮤지엄, 로스앤젤레스 현대미술관이 있다. 베니스비엔날레(1993, 1999, 2001), 휘트니비엔날레(1995, 1997, 2004), 베를린비엔날레(2006)와 같은 국제 행사와 다양한 공공미술 프로젝트에도 참여한 그의 작품은 뉴욕현대미술관(MoMA), 휘트니미술관, 뉴욕 구겐하임미술관, 로스앤젤레스 현대미술관, 테이트미술관을 비롯하여 프랑수와 피노, 다키스 조아누, 조지 에코노무, 루벨 패밀리 컬렉션 등에 소장되어 있다. 현재 작가는 로스앤젤레스에서 거주하며 활동하고 있다.
Kukje Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new work by Paul McCarthy. This is the artist’s second showing following his acclaimed Paul McCarthy: nine dwarves, which served as the inaugural exhibition of the K3 gallery in 2012. For the current show, McCarthy will install an ambitious combination of sculptures and drawings in both K2 and K3.
Over more than four decades, McCarthy has repeatedly created complex inter-related bodies of work, positioning his practice at a critical nexus in contemporary art. Exploiting genres as diverse as performance, video, sculpture, photography, and drawing, his work challenges audiences to confront myth and wrestle with the psychological undercurrents of capitalism. In repeatedly co-opting folklore, and popular iconographies, the artist’s work confronts how mass media and social conventions have shaped modern society. McCarthy has used familiar stories such as those seen in Disney cartoons and Hollywood, combining them with archetypal leitmotifs of sex, beauty, death, and religion. In this way McCarthy’s work confronts the viewer with the littered landscape of 20th century consumption and the underlying impulses of the dominant western culture industry.
These themes are perfectly embodied by Picabia Idol, a series of sculptural figures installed in K2. Cast in silicone, these brightly colored figures were inspired by a painting by the French artist Francis Picabia (1879–1953) titled Woman with Idol (1940–1943). In it an erotic female figure embraces a giant pagan idol. McCarthy juxtaposes a series of silicone sculptures of the imaginary idol with an elongated inkjet print of Picabia’s original painting that covers the wall—thereby rendering a two-dimensional phantasm into a concrete, three-dimensional entity. Appropriating the fetish object in much the same way as a Disney character, McCarthy uses the uncanny figure to comment on both myth and the processes of reproduction. In K2 variations of the “Idol” reflect the process of casting—a technique done in progressive stages that utilizes a central component known as a “core.” Typically hidden from view and encased within the sculpture itself, the artist’s interest in the core presents an unsettling vision of what lies beneath or within our fictional characters—in effect, presenting the interior space of popular myths.
In K2 there is the original idol sculpted by McCarthy titled Picabia Idol and then there are cores taken one from the other. In the first the artist added greater depth to the original subject and details not depicted by Picabia in his painting. In the progressive cores, the fabrication reveals vertical and horizontal cuts, part of the process. Each version of the Picabia Idol core sculpture reflects this technique, growing increasingly skeletal with each iteration. In this way, McCarthy acknowledges how processes designed to attain verisimilitude contain innate abstractions and symbolic meaning such as in negative or interior spaces. In rendering different stages of this archetypal fetish, the artist has created a potent reflection on desire, the primitive, and the supernatural while playfully engaging Picabia, one of the 20th century’s greatest and most enigmatic artists.
One of the unique ways the artist works is to recycle and reclaim aspects of his fabrication process as a means of creating new and unpredictable sculptures. He has likened these works to “spin-offs,” alluding both to their material evolution and the popular term in Hollywood for cross-marketing entertainment products. In the case of Snow White, McCarthy has created numerous intersecting bodies of works including video, installation, and sculpture under the title White Snow (WS). McCarthy will include two versions from this series in K2, White Snow Head, in white- (2012-3) and in a pink flesh- (2012). These will be shown alongside White Snow Head Core (2013-5).
Installed in the K3 space is another never-before-seen series of sculptures titled Cut Ups. In these works McCarthy has used a 3D-scanner to map an existing cast of his own naked body that had already been showcased several years ago and once again casts it in high-density urethane resin. Cutting and reassembling these detailed scans before they are used to make the casts, McCarthy again confronts the way form consists of both external and internal structures. By exploiting prototyping processes and casting technology, and by cutting and revealing the material embodiment of the human figure, McCarthy points to the ritual function of sculpture as well as the more mundane omnipresence of mass-produced stuff.
Exhibited in tandem on the gallery walls, the artist has also produced a suite of life-sized inkjet prints made using the same digital scans. These capture in minute detail the artist’s body as a three dimensional model. Perversely alluding back to commercial manufacturing, the digital depictions evoke a kind of autopsy or, conversely, a design for a mass-marketed figurine. McCarthy has covered the prints with thick layers of paint as well as large loosely scrawled words. By using words to partially erase or leave only the outlines of his body, the artist makes a gesture that distorts and denies a simple definition of the self.
McCarthy’s works in the exhibition illustrate how an artist’s observation of the world can be combined with the technical demands of the artistic process to form an acute cross-section, revealing the fraught, often complex relationship between people and the social structures that surround them.
Paul McCarthy was born in 1945 in Salt Lake City, Utah. He has studied at University of Utah, San Francisco Art Institute, and University of Southern California. Starting from the mid-1970s, McCarthy became known for his performance and film works. During the 1990s he extended his practice to standalone sculptural figures, installations, and large-scale sculptures both animated and inflatable, and from the mid- to late 1990s collaborated with Mike Kelley, Jason Rhoades, and Damon McCarthy. McCarthy has held solo and travelling exhibitions at numerous museums and institutions such as Hammer Museum of the University of California, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Tate Liverpool, Liverpool; Tate Modern, London; New Museum, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Other notable participations in international events and public art projects include the Venice Biennale (1993, 1999, 2001), the Whitney Biennial (1995, 1997, 2004), and the Berlin Biennial (2006). His works are housed in major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tate Collection, London; and the private collections of François Pinault, Dakis Joannou, George Economou, and the Rubell Family. The artist currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
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