To make Mickey Mouse (2010), Paul McCarthy altered a found photograph—not of the iconic cartoon, but of a man costumed as Mickey. On his shoulders he supports an enormous false head, Mickey’s familiar face grinning with glossy eyes. The artist has marked out in heavy black the background of Cinderella’s castle. Robbed of his context, the character becomes the sole focus of the image, a subject of unusual scrutiny. Under this close examination, his torso and legs begin to seem strange—too human for his extremities—and his friendly wave starts to look less like that of a childhood hero and more like that of a politician. With McCarthy’s intervention, the famous mouse is upstaged by his own artificiality.
Known for his transgressive performance art pieces that often challenge social conventions, Paul McCarthy is undoubtedly one of the main figures in the West Coast contemporary art scene. Using different forms from pop culture as source material, McCarthy casts a critical look at American society and consumerism. With a particularly poignant sense humor, his works also investigate the intricacies of human psychology.
Forest Gathering N.2 is part of the series of photographs Beneath the Roses (2003-2005) where anonymous townscapes, forest clearings and broad, desolate streets are revealed as sites of mystery and wonder; similarly, ostensibly banal interiors become the staging grounds for strange human scenarios...
Untitled is a black-and-white photograph of a wave just before it breaks as seen from the distance of an overlook...
The 10 $1 bills that make up From a Whisper to a Scream (2012) read like instructions in origami...
In her 2011 webcam video, Sickhands , Cortright poses before her in-computer camera, as her hands, hair, and body begin waving and rippling vertically across the screen, distorted by software effects...
This work is one of Koller’s many variations which he began to use from 1970 to describe the ‘cultural situations’ he created...
As the caption purposely admits, these drawings were made by friends of Ondák’s at home in Slovakia asked to interpret places he has journeyed to...
La Sombra (The Shadow) is a video of Regina Jose Galindo performing with a moving Leopard tank...
In 2012, former Guatemalan President José Efran Ros Montt was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity; Regina José Galindo’s video Tierra is a chilling reimagining of the atrocities recounted during his trial...
Nugroho’s installations and performances have their roots in the shadow puppet rituals in Indonesia, particularly the Javanese Wayang tradition whose essence is in the representation of the shadows...
The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...
Iron Sorrows (1990) brings together what are for Alexis Smith common motifs and materials such as scavenged and repurposed metal, and street signage...
The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...
Untitled (Wall Street’s Chosen Few…) is typical of Pettibon’s drawings in which fragments of text and image are united, but yet gaps remain in their signification...
In 8 Ball Surfboard (1995),Alexis Smith combines her long-term interests in California culture and conceptual assemblage...
Martin Creed | The Dick Institute Experience the work of one of this country’s most ingenious, audacious and surprising artists at the Dick Institute ARTIST ROOMS Martin Creed presents highlights from the British artist’s thirty-year career...
The Pixelated Revolution is a lecture-performance by artist Rabih Mroué about the use of mobile phones during the Syrian revolution...
From the series the Old and the New (XI) by Carlos Garaicoa belongs to the series Lo viejo y lo nuevo / Das Alte und das Neue (The Old and the New) which was first exhibited in 2010 at Barbara Gross Gallery in Germany...