Paul McCarthy’s anxieties might outlive him, by a lot. Working in a mode he’s pursued for the last decade and a half, since the start of the Bush administration, at least, he presents at Hauser & Wirth a selection of massacred clay-and-resin sculptures of the Seven Dwarves (of Disney’s Snow White). Additionally, he mirrors them with cast-bronze replicas. They’ve been violated and posed with phalluses and mangled and so on, looking a bit like sculptures by Willem de Kooning, an artist McCarthy has both admired and lampooned. Another set of sculptures, of human bodies of various sizes, run home more viscerally McCarthy’s enactment of Freudian hang ups — about castration, disembodiment, sex, death. Its territory that he’s mined since the start of his career, and is still upsetting and invigorating. How does trauma express itself in later life? Find out. NOAH DILLON
“Paul McCarthy: Raw Spinoffs Continuations,” through February 4, 2017, Hauser & Wirth, 511 W 18th Street, New York, 212 790 3900
Installation view, “Paul McCarthy: Raw Spinoffs Continuations,” at Hauser & Wirth.
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